So now that HP's joined Dell in releasing information on which laptops have those defective NVIDIA GPUs, we can sort of piece together which chips are faulty -- and just as had been rumored, it looks like basically every Geforce 8600M and 8400M chip is affected. That's not good news for NVIDIA, which has been saying that only "previous-generation" chips were problematic -- unless the chipmaker is planning on updating the hugely popular 8x00 series sometime, say, now, that's not exactly true, now is it?

We've confirmed with some of our sources that at least some of the companies in Charlie's list have indeed pulled the plug on their 790i boards and some even went as far as cancelling all future Nvidia based motherboard products.

What it boils down to is the solder material between the chip and the packaging being sub-standard. Issues only occur if the GPU is heated up and cooled down repeatedly, much as it would be in a laptop that's trying to keep a fine balance between fan noise and heat. This results in the solder becoming brittle and in the end it cracks and this will case the GPU to fail.