For about two months now, a few tech news websites have been writing about increasing rates of failure for NVIDIA GPUs. Up until yesterday, there has been little official confirmation or visible action on the part of NVIDIA to address this issue. But yesterday, NVIDIA made a move to deal with the situation -- they have earmarked about $200M against their second quarter revenue to go towards warranty charges for people sending back faulty GPUs.

The most affected chips seem to be in laptops GPUs. It also appears as if the following models from HP might have NVIDIA GPUs that are more likely to die an early death:  HP Pavilion dv2000, HP Pavilion dv6000, HP Pavilion dv9000  / Compaq Presario V3000, and Compaq Presario V6000 series computer. And if you have one of these models from Dell, you might also be concerned -- especially if your warranty is running out.

The problem purporedtly is 'weak silicon' -- that the quality of materials used in the making of the GPUs was not up to snuff, and breaks down under steady use. The GPUs found in the 8400M and 8600M seem to be citied as the most prone to failure, while some websites such as the Inquirer say that the problem is not limited to laptops, and that many more GPUs are liable to fail (G92 and G94 GPUs, found in the 8800 GT / 8800 GTS 512 / 9xxx series, and more.)   

NVIDIA has been quoted by saying (on PC World) that this money set aside should be enough to cover the problem. Hopefully, for all parties involved, more NVIDIA GPUs don't punch out earlier than they should.