Yep the Bios updates come thick and fast and on Wednesday they released A12. The list of changes are small but significant considering the people having problems with heat management and the recent news of problems with the NVidia chipset.
Fixes/Enhancements
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1. Added enhancement for thermal control.
2. Update GM965 Graphics VBIOS from 1466 to 1588.
3. Update Intel CPU family name.
Here's the proof: NVidia remedies the 84 / 86 heating problems by making the fan kick in sooner / spin faster...
Not much of a root cause resolution, just a way to buy more time till it fails some time later.
Nvidia has found that "significant quantities" of older graphics cards that shipped in notebook PCs were defective. Nvidia says it has not determined the exact cause of the problem, but it is associated with a packaging material used with some of the chips, and the thermal design of some notebooks. Nvidia will introduced a software driver that will cause the cooling fan in a notebook to spin sooner to make the chips run cooler, reducing stress on the chips. The products have been failing at "higher than normal rates."
The company has taken significant hits in the stock market, seeing its stock drop about 30%. The expected repair/replacement costs will total between $150 and $200 million, which it will take against its second quarter earnings. There are no specifics as to which products were affected, except for the fact that they are graphics cards and media and communications processors. To top everything off, Nvidia has lowered is second quarter earnings forecast.
Full Story (Yahoo.com)
For the source of all this "good news" see:
http://www.nytimes.com/id...A1944.html?ref=technology
This explains the two new BIOS versions for the XPS M1330 in 3 weeks time, both with changed thermal settings for the GPU.....
So more battery power drainage, more noise, and to top things off, the failure now most likely (or hopefully from NVidia / Dell's viewpoint?) taking place after warranty has expired, so we can pay for the motherboard replacement ourselves....
Happy slapping....