You may have read some suppositions on various tech websites (including here) that due to some shoddy materials used, a whole crop of NVIDIA GPUs have been failing at alarming rates. The GPUs reported affected are most of the 8000 and 9000 series, both desktop and mobile parts. 

Things took another turn for the worse today as a coalition of NVIDIA shareholders lead by one Lisa Miller filed legal suit against NVIDIA for a conspiratorial coverup of the extent of the problem. The suit claims that NVIDIA down-played the extent of the hardware failures reported, and that the company's financial projections have been spuriously optimistic in light of the problems.

Another aspect of this story that made news-waves was that NVIDIA released a BIOS update for Dell notebooks that made the system's fans run at %100, all the time, in order to cut down on hardware failure rates -- which many Dell users felt is not a appropriate response to the situation.

Recently NVIDIA announced that they were setting aside a $200 million fund to deal with the increased failure rates. However the website the Inquirer (which has been instrumental in investigating this story, using some sort of 'investigative journalism' or some such) contends that this fund is not nearly sufficient to address the magnitude of the somewhat occluded situation.