D830 nVidia GPU service call- results

Since I wasted a New Years Eve and Early New Years Day - I thought I might add something to the discussion......

Well, the Dell repair guy came at 9:30AM on Jan 1, 2009 (yup).  After a service call because of heat from the NVS 135M chp, they decided (thank God I bought the expensive warranty) and came out with a new motherboard and fan.  Of course my first question was - will this fix the problem?  Disclosure - I was a design engineer for Intel and worked at a BIOS company.

I looked at the new and old MOBO after they pulled it out and the part numbers on the nVidia chip; could not conclude much.  The new MOBO had an nVidia chip with PN G86-420-A2.  Not sure if that was a new revision (stepping) of the chip, but when we eventually re-booted the system the BIOS was v11 from April.  So - I am not sure if this new MOBO had a "new and improved"  nVidia Quadro NVS 135M chip.  All the part numbers did not yield any new data.

However - I did notice that the heat sinks for the new laptop MOBO had "revision A1" and a December, 2008 manufacture date.  A good heat sink alone may be the sole fix.