NVIDIA seems to be taking a bit of flack today, with stock prices dipping ever lower as the company announces a lower Q2 expectation due to pricing pressure and delayed product ramps. And they may also be taking another hit when announcing that they'll be earmarking $150 - 200 million for repair and replacement costs on their laptop line which is taking an unexpected toll from high yields of  GPU failure in consumer products.

The immediate question for many laptop owners is "which chips are they?" which would be a great question, unfortunately we're left only with the official word being "older graphics chips" -- which could range from a 9500GS and 9650 since those are technically old in the pipeline, or it could be a flurry of 8400 chips and 8600 chips as well as a huge slew of FX5200's from way back in time. I would say that getting their latest driver patch might be a good idea though given that it's set to kick in the GPU fan earlier with more sensitive thermal scaling.

For those already experiencing these failures, the company is pulling out $150-200 million to help repair and replace systems affected, this should hopefully translate into fast repairs and hopefully more focused cooling solutions to prevent it from occuring in the future. For me I've actually been checking out NVIDIA based laptops but I guess I'll be more focused on each cooling approach over how sleek or impressive it comes off on the outside.

Hopefully NVIDIA picks themselves up, they just started on their latest generation the GTX series and it looks to be doing them well, one would hope that we see some of that performance translate into the mobile market as the 9 series in the mobile line never really saw a dominant chip like the 8800.