Is the Nvidia fault affecting Macs?

Comments

• I have a Santa Rosa 17-inch MBP, 2.4 GHz with the NVIDIA 256MB GeForce 8600M GT, extended 1920x1200 screen. After a couple of days of uptime, I start to get scrolling artifacts and after that, moving windows and scrolling in windows is accompanied by an about 5 second delay. It doesn't seem to happen in Cocoa apps for some reason.
  
  A restart solves the problem. My Apple support folks suggest I just restart and deal with the issue, but I wonder if these events are symptoms of eventual failure. Posted by Peter, USA
• Mmm,
  
  I'm one of the "long term" members of the Apple discussions boards. The "level four" and "level five" posters there (people with thousands of posts to their names and usually years of experience with Macs) include a lot of MacBook pro users. I contacted those that I know of there who use them. Out of over fifty Macbook Pros that these people used or were responsible for not a single one fitted with an NVidia 8600 had suffered any video card problems.
  
  It may be a problem for a small number of users, but the suggestion that all such cards in MBPs "are failing at an alarming rate" is way over the top in my opinion.
  
  As far as the "glitch" reported by Peter goes, some users who have experienced this problem have indicated that it doesn't occur if their computer is never put to sleep! Others have indicated that it occurs only with some versions of the OS. It is possible that it involves a hardware issue in some cases, but in many I suspect that software issues are involved. Posted by Rod, Australia
• Well my 17" 2.4Ghz MBP just died too, the nvidia card is not recognized by the system and OS now reports that it has the macbook (not pro) intel card instead...
  
  80 page apple support forum would support that there are lots of us with same problem.
  
  Hope I get a quick fix, & thank goodness I spent the cash on Apple Care for it!
  Posted by Andrew Nixon, UK
• Me too, 14month old MBP, but if you push applecare they cover it. To see loads more see the apple forums: http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1150 - 10,000 views, 500+ replies... Posted by Chris Kimpton, UK
• My Mac Book Pro initially started with garbled screen then no image at all not even on external screen. Well out of warranty I fortunately found these chaps at www.techno-mart.co.uk who did repair my graphics chip. Got fixed within 3 days. saved my bacon! Posted by Ted Crossley, UK