Yeah, both me and a buddy got burned by our 8800s. If I recall correctly, it was an issue with brittle solder. The chips would heat up and the board would flex, then the solder would crack and it’d crash pretty soon after that. Worked fine until you needed to use it!
I haven’t had any other problems with nvidia since, though.
Yeah I hate brittle solder, but they like to take the lead out to be ‘green’ or whatever the hell. I would blame the marketing department or California. I still have a number of 8800s around. 3 of them still work, but one of them had some graphics corruption problems on Crysis, but other games ran fine.
One of my buddies had 2 8800s, but during a thunderstorm, something got the router and fried a bunch of stuff on the LAN, Motherboard was dead and one of the 8800s would only output green… Luckily the CPU and other 8800 was fine. Comp was unplugged, but LAN was not. Around here you pretty much better have everything on commercial grade UPS units with massive surge protection. Also power can range from 115 to 132 volts, so something to stabilize it it good regardless.
But boy, it sure makes a nice malleable solder! I get removing as many poisons as possible from the manufacturing processes, but there’s got to be a balance.
Pretty sure most people, baring a few circus freaks, will not be eating that graphics card for lunch. Some people think just because something has lead in it, it’s magically going to jump out and poison them. Dealing with molten lead/solder simply requires proper ventilation and safety procedures, similarly there are plenty of other toxic fumes and by-products in many manufacturing processes.
Exactly. The right tool for the right job. If those solder joints are going to be exposed to huge changes in temperature, better use the more malleable stuff. It’s that simple.
This problem is not owed to green marketing. The EU has severely restricted the use of lead in solder, which made vast amounts of electronics less durable, while manufacturers were struggling to figure the problem out. In particular, game consoles like Xbox 360 and PS3 were heavily affected. The resulting amount of needless e-waste probably dwarfs any positive environmental impact caused by the EU directive…
Indeed, that’s why I mentioned California (my way of saying gov. interference). Didn’t Japan do something similar?
Very true. But don’t you realize that it made some bureaucrats feel good about themselves?
The key areas are Manufacturing, usage of goods and disposal.
Manufacturing is easy to control, but you will find that many companies will ignore rules for the sake of increasing profit margins.
Usage of goods is impossible to control. For starters graphics cards aren’t the only things that need solder. Walk round your house and count how many products in your house have some form of soldering in them. It’s a lot of potential exposure. Joe in his garage trying to fix one of his broken items isn’t going to have access to high quality safety gear. Also simply dropping an electronic item in water could lead to lead contamination.
All of these items need to be disposed of properly or there will be environmental contamination. A vast majority of people will just bin broken electronics instead of disposing of them properly.