Earlier this month, sites like Ars Technica and ZDNet blogged about NVIDIA’s statement regarding a potential issue with some of NVIDIA's Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) used in notebooks. According to NVIDIA, these affected GPUs are experiencing higher than expected failure rates causing video problems. Though this issue is not unique to Dell, some of these affected GPUs are used in certain Dell laptops. That's why I wanted to take a few minutes here to explain the issue and to let customers know what to do next.
The issue is a weak die/packaging material set, which may fail with GPU temperature fluctuations. If your GPU fails, you may see intermittent symptoms during early stages of failure that include:
-Multiple images
-Random characters on the screen
-Lines on the screen
-No video
Dell recommends that you flash your system BIOS (see links in the table below).
Note: if you are already experiencing video-related issues like the bullet points above, updating the BIOS will not correct them.
Inspiron 1420
Latitude D630
Latitude D630c
Dell Precision M2300
Vostro Notebook 1310
Vostro Notebook 1400
Vostro Notebook 1510
Vostro Notebook 1710
XPS M1330
XPS M1530
New systems are being shipped with the updated BIOS revisions.
