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Every Nvidia Graphics Card With G84 or G86 Chipset Is Ready to Die
Dell Extends Warranties for Laptops With Failing Nvidia Chips While Nvidia Stays Mum

How about Dell laptops with other nVidia series cards?
My company bought 3 Inspiron 9400s, identical to one another. Each one has a GeForce Go 7900 GS.

One of those three shipped with the video card already defective. It started off with minor polygon/3d-model distortion in 3d applications (games mostly). Then the distortion got worse as time went on. Then eventually we started seeing other aspects of the video rending start to go corrupt, such as stretched/distored 2d graphics, bits of the screen missing. So we had Dell ship us a replacement video card. It’s been fine since then.

Then recently another laptop (mine) started showing the same symptoms as the first one. So we called Dell again and they sent us another replacement video card. Only this time the video corruption was still there and worse. So next, I tried swapping RAM with the last “no problems” laptop. Still didn’t work. We even tried swapping the CPUs. Still didn’t work. So we called Dell back and they send us a replacement motherboard. We installed it. Still no change.
So finally we swapped the video cards on my laptop and the “no problems” laptop. And it finally worked again.

So apparently the video card Dell sent us was defective out of the box. Which brings us to a total of 3 defective videos cards we’ve received from them (the first laptop, mine, then the replacement for mine).

We’ve called in again that we need another video card, and they basically told us that they don’t believe us and will be sending a technician to us to check it out him or herself, which has left me very angry with them as this means I’m without my laptop for even longer. It’s been about a month now since mine has become unusable. And to make matters worse, I live in a remote region that DHL doesn’t ship to, and Dell always insists on shipping through them even after we tell them we can’t receive DHL. And I’m sure it’ll take them another month to send a technician down from wherever just to look at it, tell us it needs a new video card, then leave us waiting for Dell to send another one, that could be defective out of the box.