Are all D630s faulty?

I bought a Latitude D630 from Ebay and as soon as I got it I noticed that when watching YouTube videos, it artifacted like crazy. I sent it back to the seller who agreed to replace it as it's a common issue apparently. This has me worried, because there's only a 30 day warranty from the seller and the Dell warranty will have already expired.

I plan to use the laptop for light gaming when I'm away from home and I'm worried that the Nvidia chip will crap out on me after a few months.

Do they all break or is it likely to last at least a year or two?

 

There's a newer version of the Nvidia GPU that supposedly won't have the same issue, but it's not easy to tell. Either way, I would not recommend gaming on the Nvidia version of the D630 at all.

If you want to be safe, just get a D630 with integrated graphics.

 

I think it's like the T61p and R61 with Nvidia from Lenovo, after a certain date August '08 I believe they are sporting the revised chip 140M, but I still wouldn't risk it. Plenty of D630 with Crestline graphics (Intel X3100).

 

I don't think they "fixed" anything on the chips on those "fixed" revisions. On the D830 the later revisions have a direct-contact heatsink, and on the D630 they have a slightly fatter/denser thermal pad. The latter two are what I think Dell considers the "fix".

 

I read that the G86-631-A2 revision is "fixed", but is there an easy way of finding that chip ID? I could take it apart and look at the GPU, but I'd rather not have to.

 

Inspecting the chip is the only way to verify.