It has been a bad week for Nvidia by anyone’s standards. First off, individual laptop manufacturers such as Apple and HP came out with the news that certain models of their notebooks range had defective graphics cards. Now HP has confirmed that up to 38 different desktop models in their lineup might also be suffering from defective or faulty Nvidia graphics cards.
Considering that competition from ATI is only getting tougher, this was most definitely not a smooth move on the part of Nvidia. What are we talking about? Nvidia had initially denied any fault in their graphics cards for the notebook issue and has since then kept silent allowing the various laptop manufacturers such as Apple and HP to deal with the issue by themselves.
Nvidia has also recently made a decision to rename some of its older cards. For example the GeForce GT 120 will be a GeForce 9500 GT. That is just one example, there’s a whole host of other cards that have been renamed. This move is likely to create confusion amongst consumers as to what exactly they are buying. Perhaps that is why Nvidia has made this move, to increase sales for some of the older cards.
My union is supporting a consumer recall of affected Nvidia chips. See http://www.recallnvidia.org for more info about the chip problem and our recall effort.