nVidia Quadro NVS 135M Crash

This is one of nVidia's problem children, which has probably failed.  Dell has a 1-year warranty extension on these, so if it's less than two years old and you had a 1-year warranty to begin with, they'll replace the mainboard:

http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2008/08/18/nvidia-gpu-update-dell-to-offer-warranty-enhancement-to-all-affected-customers-worldwide.aspx

I am having the exact same problem as Stephanb23. Two or three weeks ago I was doing normal work on my D630 when all the screen colors intensified and then the screen turned black with some vertical lines. I can still turn the computer on but all I get is a dark gray screen with vertical lines. This was a used computer that I bought about one year ago. Please tell me what I can do. Thank you.

I'm having almost the exact same problem... everything's been fine for as long as I've had my D630, then one day the screen saver froze and I couldn't wake up the machine... rebooted and saw the vertical lines, as well as a horizontally split display.

If I cold boot the machine multiple times, I can get it to start up OK, but at some point the display freezes and locks up the entire machine.  It's also started flickering before freezing the machine.

Would love to know if it is in fact the card failing or the controller on the mother board... Any help/info is greatly appreciated.  Other than this problem, I've had nothing but great success with Dell & this laptop.

Many thanks.

This has been happening to my D630 too. I finally figured out the problem is the Graphics Driver. I had to uninstall the current driver and roll back to a previous version. I think that microsoft update had installed a more up to date driver and this was the cause. Turned of MS update and laptop has been trouble free fo the last couple of days.

Hope this helps.

If you're within the 12 month expiration of your warranty, contact Dell - you may have temporarily covered the symptoms, but the video chip is failing - they'll be back.  Have Dell replace the mainboard.

Hi EJN63,

Have to say this problem re-occured today and I did have to mess about with the graphics driver again to fix. I have to admit that all my initial feelings suggested this was a hardware fault, (15 years as an engineer on hardware and software.) but was led to believe a software issue as I have had to run several repairs on my OS as a result of this issue. (Currently running Win 7 Ultimate.)

I am again leaning back to hardware possibly at fault as again this issue happened at boot and while trying to enter setup. I am lucky enough to have approx 7 months of warranty left on this laptop and as the guys who would be repairing this are all known to me, previously worked for the 2 companies that have the Dell warranty contracts in Ireland though my Dell certification has slipped, do not want to add to their workload unnecessarily, I was wondering is this a known issue with the Nvidea Graphics Card. I have not been able to find any reference to this outside of Dell forum. Interestingly I can not flash the BIOS now!!!

I am always reluctant to admit defeat on a repair but firmly believe that I DO NOT IN FACT know it all... :emotion-5:

I have again stress tested boot with the new driver and all seems OK so would be interested to hear your experiences with this. I will be monitoring this situation over the next while but on the next occurance, on your advice, I will be contacting Dell support.

Regards,

D

It's very well known these chips are faulty - the NVS135 is a G84 core chip - and nVidia has admitted that "many" - some say "All" of these are faulty and the failure rates have skyrocketed on them. 

Dell has a 12-month extension on the chip for failure - others did so for longer (Apple), others about the same (HP/Compaq), and some others just totally ignored their customers and did nothing (Toshiba).

There are many who believe all of the nVidia chips from the 7000, 8000 and 9000 series are troublesome.  Interestingly, nVidia changed its design with the most recent chips - matching the design ATI has been using all along;  you can use your own imagination to fill in the rest.

Start here:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1028703/nvidia-g84-g86-bad

and here:

http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/Direct2Dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2008/08/18/nvidia-gpu-update-dell-to-offer-warranty-enhancement-to-all-affected-customers-worldwide.aspx

Great, just great.  I want a faster processor & a better graphics card - only to find out that the failing computer is probably past the warranty period (even the extended warranty period) and that the replacement I just paid for may not be in any better shape when it gets here.

Lovely.  I wish I still had my previous D630 with the Intell graphics card.  It *worked* - no green or pink vertical lines, no multi-colored horizontal lines, and no strange "color negative" effect when the failing card decided to *blink*. 

Now - do I put more money into this danged thing?  A new motherboard probably means that the current COA from Microsoft wouldn't work any more either, doesn't it?  So the upgrades to Vista and then Windows 7 64 bit were a waste of time, effort, and money.

Updating the driver on the graphics card ust accelerated how fast the "artifacts" (errors) on the screen showed up.  XP can be stable for an hour or two and I can get a bit of work done.  Vista 32 bit or Windows 7 64 bit seem to crash faster - sometimes I have less than twenty minutes to try and get anything done before the screen goes striped, black, or "reversed".  Sometimes the mouse, touchpad, and control stick all freeze up as well...........

Oddly enough, using the basic VGA driver from the operating system install seems to give me the most time to work - but the worst video display (1.0 on Windows Experience Index compared to 3.9 with the NVIDIA driver) and games or other graphics intensive applications run so slowly as to be almost useless.

Hey me too,

I picked up a D630 on eBay a couple months ago.  Starting to experience problems too.  Can I purchase a system board with a dif video card?

It's been running pretty well Safe Mode though.

I got very lucky - I had run a couple of the hardware tests on the tech support website BEFORE the extended warranty period ended, then tracked down the extended warranty a couple of days past the end of the time frame.

The tech sent it up the line to a supervisor and they ended up fixing it (replacing the motherboard, since the graphics chip is soldered to it) under the extended warranty.

I love my Dell Latitude D630 - I love it so much that I now have a SPARE Dell Latitude D630, with the same graphics card, so that I have one downstairs for surfing & light use and another one upstairs (larger hard drive and maxed out on the RAM) to run some niche software (embroidery machine and other sewing software).  The extra RAM makes sure that it doesn't slow down due to having more than one program going at the same time.

I am one very, very happy Dell laptop owner!

The extended warranty is for three years past the date it was first put into service - so check the dates on your Service Tag and the warranty period asap.  And run the hardware test, just to see how your laptop is doing.

Both of mine are working (and the other still has two or three weeks left in the extended warranty period - I am using it to make sure that it anything does go wrong, I know about it as soon as possible).

Great thanks - I see system boards on eBay (ugh!) with Intel Video plus heatsink.

This shipped date for this D630 was 11/7/2007 but I purchased it on eBay a couple months ago - looks like it's never been used.  Once before I purchased a Dell laptop on eBay & when I filled out the form online for replacement discs they gave me a year warranty for free.  Suppose I could try that again.

Sorry for the early post but the cursor is doing some funky stuff in Safe Mode.  Maybe there's an auto-save feature thats knocking me around.

So - I'm not entirely sure it's a hardware issue yet.  Will run some more tests.  But if does require replacing the system board definitely going with Intel.

thanks all