NVIDIA Chip Instability Spreading to 17″ MacBook Pros?

By

post-9343-image-5e8af5823362342871687508aba30d91-jpg

Back in December we wrote about a potential land-mine of problems for owners of new MacBook Pro 15″ notebooks, related to possibly defective NVIDIA GeForce 9400 graphics processor chips that Apple may have knowingly shipped with some units in 2008.

So far, the major storm speculated about by the Inquirer in that report does not appear to have manifested. But new reports Friday regarding some threads in the Apple support forum indicate that some owners of the new MacBook Pro 17″ model are complaining about a persistent graphics issue related to the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 chip included in those machines.

Recently some NVIDIA notebook GPUs began failing that were used in many notebook computers from Dell and Apple among others. The GPU failures ultimately led to a lawsuit being filed against NVIDIA by some affected notebook owners.

The current issue manifests in green lines that appear all over the notebook screen. More than one user is having the same exact issue, even on new notebooks. The error appears to be limited solely to the 9600M GPU. At this point, if a replacement is needed for the GPU or a firmware fix will suffice is unknown.

Is your new MacBook Pro 17″ giving you graphics fits? Let us know in comments below.

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.

Comments are closed.