Personal Opinion: Some of those articles feel poorly researched and lack a >consistent wording. Sometimes wording seems entirely inappropriate for >journalism (Quote: "Small batch my ar||!") Sometimes the editors reference >products by technical names and sometimes via the marketed names. Sometimes >they seem to indicate all chips (even chips with the changed material) are bad >altogether:
I follow the inquirer since it was founded in 2001 and also before the founder was still working at theRegister. What you have to know about the inquirer is that they write with their british humor and often use sarcasm and other stylistic elements. For me its one of the best site for IT related news and rumors - others don't like their "style" of reporting things and often hate it. But i have laughed so often about their jokes and hidden hints and i appreciate their different perspective on things. If you want dead serious articles and prefer common-views and conformity theinquirer is not the place for you.
Let me make some examples:
Itanic - A combination of Itanium (64 Bit CPU from Intel) and Titanic. (this hits the nail on the head 🙂
Daamit - When AMD bought ATI: AMD+ATI=DAAMIT - :-D
Here's a guide to the terminology used:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=8069
*So besides their style (wording, jokes, slang, kind of writing etc) what about the content?*
In my experience of the past 7 years theInquirer was about 90% right. (I could mention so many things they predicted/wrote which turned out to be true (for instance they were the first to write about the Sony, Dell, Apple Laptop Battery Scandal - subsequently to that a worldwide recall was initiated. Many renowned publications, such as The New York Times, reprinted The Inquirer's photographs).
Of course there were other things they weren't right about - but people forget that the article was often clearly "marked" as a rumor. If the article starts with a statement like "We've heard an odd, but strong whisper on the grapevine . . ." These articles lack official confirmation and it can be considered as rumor or speculation. But even many of those turn out to be true afterwards.
Of course someone should never turn of his common sense while reading
any news source and take everything with a grain of salt.
So especially in their latest article what do you find odd?
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/12/09/apple-macbook-pros-nvidia -bad
They dissected a mbp and proved that against the claims of nvidia a buggy graphic chip has been used - and that highly plausible to me (Quote: "buy a Macbook off the shelf, disassemble it, desolder the chips, saw them in half, encase them in lucite, and run them through a scanning electron microscope equipped with an X-ray microanalysis system")
Are NVidia's Chips (9400M and/or 9600M GT) affected by a serial flaw similar >to one related to the 'silent' recall we have seen for early 2008 MBPs? (be it >base material issues or tiny solder material issues)
As the article states - the 9400M is not effected but the 9600M is
Does the problem affect some chips (a particular batch of chips? A set of >'older chips'?) or potentially all chips?
As the older articles state nvidia intermixed old (buggy) chips and new not affected ones. Thus you can't differentiate.
Is there a flaw in the thermal design?
Partly - its a flaw in the packaging material - which basically means its thermal design is flawed (but the (chip)die itself is not affected)
How long can a GPU survive temperatures of 80 degrees Celsius?
Difficult to say but to quote one of the articles again: " with field reports on specific parts hitting up to 40 per cent early life failures"
But again it is difficult to say your chip will last 39,0422 month or something like that.
Could it be a combination of very edgy thermal design and failing material in >the graphics chip?
Since i don't want to quote the articles over and over again 😉 its said there.
And personally I wonder what can we do if some techniques help for now (higher >fan-speed) but in 12 month when exposed to a lot of stress and lots of hours >of high temperature the 9600M GT breaks apart entirely?
Yeah that will happen especially if apple does not make a recall but only increases the fan-speed and/or underclocks the GPU.
I think what one can do is to get a carepack which extends the warranty to 3 years - but for this additional cost we as users have to bleed 😟
Regards,
ToM
