1520 8600m gt screen flashes when gaming, defective gpu?

I have owned my dell 1520 for about 1 year now and I thought I would share this information because I haven't seen a post yet about defective GPU's in the 1420's and 1520's.

After I read the thread about Dell/Nvidia admitting to defective GPUs I freaked out that 8600m gt's were failing. Now the ddr2 8600m gt was not listed, but after playing games for a year on my laptop(ddr2 8600m gt) I noticed my screen would flash, stutter, then it would come back on with stuttered gameplay. Only a restart would fix the lag.

Now I'm only a single person, so my experience does not mean that all 8600m gt's are defective, but if you have a similar experience with an 8600m gt, share them, so we can get an idea of how widespread this is.

There have already been many xps m1330 reports and looking at its pitiful gpu cooling system, I can't say I'm surprised.

I also saw that there was a copper mod for the m1330. I'm wondering if anyone has done this to their 1520/25/xps m1530, to slow down the failure rate of gpu's. My 1520 uses pretty thick thermal pads, so I'm not sure if the copper sheet would be thick enough to fill the gap.

I honestly believe $200million that Nvidia is setting aside to cover this defect will not be enough. I also believe the BIOS update is a band aid put on a severed limb. A software fix is there just to weather the costs of failed gpu's as most laptops would be out of warranty by then.

My advice? I guess try to extend your warranty. This is my first time being a laptop owner, and it sucks that it was a bad experience. Next time integrated graphics all the way for laptop and dedicated desktop.

 

dont be so critical,it might be a software issue,try to reformat and then if it doesnt work contact dell.

 

The stutters and flashes might be caused by a driver crash... the low performance afterwards could also be due to a faulty driver or downclocking. Your GPU doesn't necessarily have to die right after Nvidia published their little vague message.

 

The fault you're describing is what I get if I use drivers 174.31 upwards without disabling powermizer. There is no overheating taking place when this happens so I don't think it is that. I don't have a Dell, but I do have a 8600mGT DDR2 card in my notebook. I don't think this is related to the GPU failures, unless it turns out that the failures are brought on/more apparent with the drivers post 174.31. I just chalked it up to incompatible drivers as I don't have a single problem with 174.12 or earlier drivers (167 series).

 

Do you guys suggest I get drivers from laptop video or directly off of dells website?

The current vid driver is 175.97 V32 A08. So I should install an older driver?