The GPU may fail due to temperature fluctuations and users may experience symptoms like random characters or lines on the screen. The problem is that if customers experience those symptoms the Bios update will not help them anymore and they have to contact Dell support to fix the issue.

Everyone else should check the website to see if their Dell notebook is in the list and update the Bios of its GPU accordingly. The affected notebooks according to Dell are:

• Inspiron 1420
• Latitude D630
• Latitude D630c
• Dell Precision M2300
• Vostro Notebook 1310
• Vostro Notebook 1400
• Vostro Notebook 1510
• Vostro Notebook 1710
• XPS M1330
• XPS M1530

The Bios update will turn on the GPU fan more frequently at half or quarter speed to reduce temperature fluctuations. Dell confirmed once again that this will have no noticeable effect on battery life. New notebooks will be shipped with the updated Bios.

The real question however is which GPUs are affected but there does not seem to be a direct answer for this. There is however the list of Nividia GPUs that have been used in the affected Dell notebooks, here it is:

• 128MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8400M GS
• 128MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8400M GS (64 bit)
• 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8400M GS
• 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8600M GS (128 bit)
• 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT
• 128MB NVIDIA® Quadro NVS 135M
• NVIDIA Quadro FX 360M 256MB TurboCache (128MB dedicated)

My suggestion would be to check your notebook, even if it is not from Dell, to find out if a video card from the list has been used to build it. If that is the case contact the hardware manufacturer to find out how he handles the problem.

More interesting is the Open GL Caps tab which provides extensive information about Open GL capabilities of the video card among them the OpenGL version, texture size and number of texture units. The same tab lists the Open GL Extensions that are supported by the video card.

The core temperature of the video card is always displayed in the title bar of the software and several stress test demos and one named Open GL Burner are provided to stress test the video card.

It’s possible to start multiple demos at once to put lots of strain on the video card to see how it handles the load. The data can be exported in XML format. Another nice feature of GPU Caps Viewer is a links section that provides links to the latest drivers and information about the video card.

My 6600 GT was making lots of noises that were driving me crazy. I could not understand why it was necessary to run the fan in full speed when writing a blog post like this. I was able to reduce the fan speed using the software Rivatuner which has fan profiles for 2D, low power 3D and 3D modes.

Reducing the fan speed is not possible for every video card. I had to update the bios of my last video card to be able to reduce the fan speed. My suggestion is to load Rivatuner and see if you can change the fan speeds to reduce the noise of your video card. Here is how you do that:

Begin by downloading and installing Rivatuner. Once that is done run the software, you will see the following screen.

Click on Customize in the Driver settings block. A overlay menu should appear with several icons, click on the first entitled System Settings. This will load another menu with several tabs. The second tab is called Fan and that is where you can reduce the fan speed for the different modes.

I suggest to play around with the settings a little bit. I would leave the performance 3D setting at 100% and reduce the other two settings. In my case I have given them the values 40% and 50% respectively. Make sure that you monitor temperatures of your video card when applying this settings. You have to make sure that it is running stable with this reduced fan speeds.

Click on Apply fan settings at Windows startup. This ensures that fan speed will be reduced during Windows startup to lower the noise when working with Windows.

Rivatuner has an option to monitor the temperature of the video card. Click on ok to leave that menu so that you see the main menu again. Click the Customize link at the Target Adapter setting and select Hardware Monitoring from the list. Now click on the red dot in the left bottom corner. This starts hardware monitoring and will report the temperature of the video card if it has a thermal diode.

Once a 3D application is started the fan starts spinning faster to be able to cool the video card. RivaTuner users may use several other settings in the program to overclock their video card or create custom settings for certain applications. I’m personally using it only to reduce the fan speed but hardcore gamers who need every fps they can get will find the overclocking settings as useful.

To be honest, I did not check all the settings that you may alter in detail but it looks really complex and complete. From refresh rate to AGP transfer rate, everything seems to be at place and accessible if you need to tweak a certain value.