NVIDIA Responds to INQ - C51, Geforce 6150, GeForce 6100 in Full Production and Selling Well

Bryan Del Rizzo, NVIDIA’s Senior PR Manager, has responded to the Inquirer’s recent article Nvidia pulls C51, Geforce 6150 motherboards - Data corruption involved:

An article has appeared today on the Inquirer claiming that NVIDIA has “pulled all of the C51, GeForce 6100 and GeForce 6150 motherboards as it discovered some serious flaws.”

These claims are entirely false. NVIDIA has not ceased shipping, pulled back, or recalled any NVIDIA nForce products. Our recently announced GeForce 6150, GeForce 6100, and NVIDIA nForce 430/400-based GPU motherboards are in full production and are selling very well for us, as are all of our NVIDIA nForce products, including NVIDIA nForce4 SLI, which continues to set the standard for dual GPU configurations.

In its story, the Inquirer article makes many factually inaccurate statements. The first claims there is a problem with our ActiveArmor Firewall on dual LAN motherboards. The Inquirer claims that boards with two LAN ports would cause confusion for consumers who would not know whether or not they were protected by the NVIDIA Firewall. As you may know, the NVIDIA Firewall is built directly into the NVIDIA networking driver. It was designed this way to stop possible hacking attempts when booting up your PC.

For those motherboards with a secondary LAN port, the end user would have to install a third party network driver that would normally be supplied by the motherboard manufacturer. How the LAN ports are marked/named/designated on the actual motherboard backplane is up to the motherboard manufacturer.

Because the NVIDIA Firewall is built into our networking driver, it of course only works with the NVIDIA LAN port. An end user would have to install a standalone Firewall application to protect the secondary LAN port, if enabled. This is not new information, and in fact, was disclosed when we launched our first NVIDIA nForce3 product a few years ago.

In addition, there are no dual LAN GeForce 6100/nForce 400 motherboards in development. So, the assertion that this “development” would somehow force us to recall NVIDIA GeForce 6150/6100-based GPU motherboards is untrue.

The Inquirer article then goes on to say that some users have experienced “data corruption issues with this chipset.” The article provides a link to a thread on “forums.nvidia.com”, which was only started on October 9, 2005, where a few end users have described a problem doing multiple copies of the same file. However, a posting from today, October 21, 2005, claims the issue is related to a hard disk drive firmware issue and includes a link to the firmware .zip file.

As we do with all end-user comments, we are investigating this thread as we are not aware of any such issue relating to any NVIDIA nForce products relating to data corruption.

How the Inquirer makes a connection of a recent Web thread to a theoretical worldwide recall of our entire new product portfolio is beyond us.

Again, just to be clear, we have NOT ceased shipping, pulled back, or recalled any NVIDIA nForce products. Our recently announced GeForce 6150, GeForce 6100, and nForce 430/400-based GPU motherboards are in full production and are selling very well for us, as are all of our nForce products, including nForce4 SLI, which continues to set the standard for dual GPU configurations.

If you have already bought one of these products, we thank-you for your patronage and continued support of NVIDIA and our partners in the retail channel. We hope you enjoy using these products as much as we have enjoyed designing it and bringing it to market.

For those of you interested in purchasing GeForce 6100/6150-based GPU motherboard solutions today, please check out such leading e-tail sites such as www.newegg.com where there are a wide variety of products currently available, including:
- ASRock K8NF4G-SATA2 Socket 754 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
- BIOSTAR TForce6100 Socket 754 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
- BIOSTAR TForce6100-939 Socket 939 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
- GIGABYTE GA-K8N51GMF-9 Socket 939 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
- BIOSTAR iDEQ 330N AMD Socket 939 AMD Athlon 64 FX/Athlon 64/Sempron NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Barebone - Retail

All of these products are terrific for your home, business, and small form factor use.
Cheers!

Bryan Del Rizzo

Yesterday the Inquirer replied with a follow-up article, Nvidia denies C51 problems - Biostar happily shipping:

I admit that I misunderstood our Far East chap who claimed that its company recalled all of its board and postponed its till middle of next month. The motherboard manufacture had problems with Nvidia Active armour on a single card but it still decided to recall its boards two weeks ago, and some of the boards had to be taken back from the shops. The motherboard company blamed the problem on Nvidia and Nvidia blamed it as neither wants to pay for this recall procedure.

We will ask around to see what’s going on, because something is. Big motherboard manufacturers don’t recall their boards for a small reason and Nvidia implies that it has to be the motherboard manufacturers’ problems, not Nvidia’s as its chipsets are flawless.