Don't Buy High End!!!

Some of you guys are now out there going: WHAT THE *%&* !!! First he tells us not to buy the bottom end "consumer" computers, now we aren't supposed to by the "high end"!?! 

Well....snuggle down and let me tell you a little fairy tale..... OK, no fairy tale, but in a land not so far away, laptop manufacturers started looking for increasingly higher end graphic chip solutions so that everything could look cooler and games (that which laptops were never designed to do) could be played better. Actually, it wasn't even that long ago; about 6-8 years ago, around the time of the late P4-M and early Pentium M processors. ATI was first "out the gate" with full-blown very capable graphics processors (GPUs), of that generation. Around the 2 year (remember this) mark, computers ranging from Apple iBooks to ThinkPads began succumbing to the "black-screen" syndrome. Basically failing to P.O.S.T. due to the graphic subsystem failing. Come to find out, they had developed what became known as the Ball Grid Array (BGA) cracking issue. Essentially, the problem was that over many cycles of heating and cooling the differing materials of the MB vs. the chip's differing cooling rates cause stress fractures to occur at the "ball" of solder that was the attachment point between the two. Over time, this would become severe enough to cause the two to lose communications and the result would be the infamous "black-screen". Occasionally, people would "reflow" them and through heating would create a reattachment, but in most cases, it would fail again. 

Fast forward 5-6 years and the high end of the notebook GPU market had been taken over by arch-rival nVidia. So if you were really interested in power, then you upgraded from the integrated Intel GPU to a full-blown stand-alone graphics solution. Two years and a class action lawsuit later, it was found that these high end chips had a flaw, plus also suffering from the dreaded BGA issue as well! TA-DA!!! 

Light the torches, grab the pitchforks, and let's go get those money-grubbing graphic chip manufacturers and string them up! They must be witches! We'll all run out and get some Savage S3 or better yet, Hercules graphic cards! Derp....... So what happened? The fact of the matter is: that amount of heat is not designed to be contained in a very small notebook computer case. It doesn't matter whether the manufacturer is ATI or nVidia, high end stand-alone GPU are not designed to be sufficiently cooled in notebook computers. I'll go a step further to say that it's mostly the consumers' fault!

Let me start by stating very clearly that what I relate is from my observation and experience talking to original users of failed machines. For the last couple of years, an inordinate number of folks have brought me their dead machines that have suffered similar dead GPUs. In almost every case, the user had been either a gamer (derp), or someone who routinely used the computer on carpet, a blanket, or pillow, and many case....all of the above! You know those funny looking slots on the bottom? Yeah, anything soft that can cover those up.....not good. When you combine a major heat generating chip with covered up vents, that's really not good.

Today, I was brought another machine exhibiting the same symptoms, a HP DV6000 series. That'd be the third one of that series alone in the last 6 months. So imagine what a place like Best Buy's Geek Squad looks like? Last year a co-worker brought me her son's machine that was exhibiting the same issues. I even managed to reflow that Dell XPS M1530 so that it worked for several months.

Now, all isn't lost. If you have a machine that's been office used (eg. on an actual desk) and not abused, then chances are good that it'll run for several years. Actually my wife has been very happily using one of these "defective" T61s for close to a year now. It was used corporately for about 3 years before that. It's fast, does everything anyone who's not a gamer would want and it cost me $65 off of the local Craig's List. After bumping the RAM up to 4Gb, and installing a 240Gb SSD, it and the high res. WSXGA screen is everything that she wants: not one complaint since I put her on it last year! Now, does that mean that I'd recommend that for everyone? The answer is an unequivocal, NO! Just go back and read about the T61 I just did for a friend's wife who had an Acer with a  broken screen. I purposely sorted through literally dozens of T61s for sale on eBay to find one that had the cool running (relatively speaking) integrated Intel GPU that I picked up at an excellent $126. She won't have to worry one bit about that machine. For me; the $65 risk is worth taking given that it's my wife and if it fails, I know it's backed up (because my server automatically does this) and I can put her into another computer in the blink of an eye. 

So, what's the deal? Are those graphic companies just incompetent or are they out to try and take us all to the cleaners? I believe the answer is no on both counts. I believe that the consumer and the market has them in a "no win" situation. We demand new more powerful computers capable of doing more. And as the market shifted from desktop to laptop computing, we asked for something that laptops were never designed to do and we wanted to do it in smaller packages. Smaller means less capability to cool. However, nobody wants to say no, so the engineers do what the managers want, who have been convinced by the marketing guys that it's what the consumers are demanding. So they create designs that stand on the knife edge of functionality that can do exactly that they say it can, if conditions are just right, but only for so long. Then when the consumer pushes the envelop ever so slightly..........