"Faulty" isn't as cut and dry as you may think. nVidia doesn't necessarily
design the cooler in a laptop. Moreover, the GPU isn't the only
heat-producing component in the system. The company that designs the whole
laptop is ultimately responsible to ensure all the parts they've selected
can survive the laptop's internal temperatures. I imagine Dell and HP still
design their laptops, then contract out the manufacturing.

Thermal cycle testing is easy to do. Take for example the Dell XPS M1530,
it's advertised to operate in ambient temps of 0 to 35C.
http://support.dell.com/support/edoc....htm#wp1104221
It's easy enough to get a small chamber to alternate between 0C and 35C in
5-minute intervals, then script a couple of burn-in apps such as Toast and
ATiTool to put the CPU and GPU under load when the chamber cycles to 35C. In
two weeks they can accumulate over 2000 extreme thermal cycles and validate
the product.

If Dell and HP "trusted" their contractor manufacturers to cobble together
laptops from a paper design, without any qualification testing of
prototypes, then yes it's Dell and HP's own damn fault.

--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."


"Mr.E Solved!" wrote in message
. ..
First of One wrote:
The difference is that the automotive industry actually test their
prototypes. :-) Consequently the blame lies squarely with Dell and HP for
failing to do proper component integration. It isn't difficult or
expensive to do thermal shock and cycling tests on laptops.


Wow, you want to lay the blame on Dell and HP?

Why not Clevo and Compal and Quanta (who actually make HP and Dell
notebooks) or even Mitac, Asus, Acer, Arima, ECS/Uniwill.

No, you can't blame the laptop maker for a bad video chip package that
they in good faith installed.

Of course, if they knew the chips were faulty and installed them
anyway...that's a whole different concept of culpability.