Thursday, December 31, 2009

Nvidia G84/G86 Chips Defective (Overheating)

Got to have this in mind for a VGA card upgrade (this page is worth reading, series 9 is more appropriate for my needs).


Links related to this issue:
The Inquirer - All Nvidia G84 and G86s are bad
Tom's Hardware - Report: All Nvidia G84/G86 Chips Defective
ZDnet - Report: NVIDIA issues cover all G84 and G86 GPUs
Maximum PC - Burning Question: Are All Nvidia G84 and G86 Parts Bad?


About G84/G86 and video decoding in hardware
Available from 2006 and part of GeForce 8 Series of GPU made by nVidia, these cores came as GeForce 8600 GS/GT/GTS (G84) and GeForce 8300 GS (OEM)/8300 GS/8500 GT (G86), PCIe only. The mobile cores came as GeForce 8600M GS/8600M GT/8600M GT and GeForce 8400M G/GS/GT (G86M).

"Starting with the G84/G86 GPUs (sold as the GeForce 8400/8500/8600 series), NVIDIA substantially re-designed GPU's H.264 decoding block. The second generation PureVideo HD added a dedicated bitstream processor (BSP) and enhanced video processor, which enabled the GPU to completely offload the H.264-decoding pipeline. VC-1 acceleration was also improved, with PureVideo HD now able to offload more of VC-1-decoding pipeline's backend (inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT) and motion compensation stages). The frontend (bitstream) pipeline is still decoded by the host CPU. The second generation PureVideo HD enabled mainstream PCs to play HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies, as the majority of the processing-intenstive video-decoding was now offloaded to the GPU. From GeForce 178.24 drivers onwards, VP2 capable cards are able to decode H.264 High@L5.1 while ATI UVD2 can support up to H.264 High@L4.1.
The second generation PureVideo HD is sometimes called "PureVideo HD 2" or VP2, although this is not an official NVIDIA designation.
...
In 2006, PureVideo HD was formally introduced with the launch of the GeForce 7900, which had the first generation PureVideo HD. In 2007, when the second generation PureVideo HD (VP2) hardware launched with the Geforce 8500 GT/8600 GT/8600 GTS, NVIDIA expanded Purevideo HD to include both the first generation (retroactively called "PureVideo HD 1" or VP1) GPUs (Geforce 7900/8800 GTX) and newer VP2 GPUs. This led to a confusing product portfolio containing GPUs from two distinctly different generational capabilities: the newer VP2 based cores (Geforce 8500 GT/8600 GT/8600 GTS/8800 GT) and other older PureVideo HD 1 based cores (Geforce 7900/G80).

NVIDIA claims that all GPUs carrying the PureVideo HD label fully support Blu-ray/HD DVD playback with the proper system components. For H.264/AVC content, VP1 offers markedly inferior acceleration compared to newer VP2, VP3 and VP4 GPUs, placing a much greater burden on the host CPU. However, a sufficiently fast host CPU can play Blu-ray without any hardware assistance whatsoever." [source: Wikipedia]

ATI's Avivo and the accompanied Unified Video Decoder is the primary competitor of nVidia PureVideo in hardware decoding of video.


Read bellow about the G84/G86 chips generation for GPU cards:
Comparison of Nvidia graphics processing units [Wikipedia]
GeForce 8 Series [Wikipedia]

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Updated / Actualizat: 2009-12-31.

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