Graphics card vendor Diamond Multimedia may have shipped between 15,000 and 20,000 AMD/ATI HD 3800-series with design/manufacturing defects to system builders and the retail market. Industry sources told TG Daily that these cards shipped between January and July of this year more than 15,000 units may have ended up in customer hands or are still being sold. Diamond denied that there is a problem with its cards, but confirmed that there was an isolated problem with one system builder earlier this year.

According to our industry source, Diamond Multimedia has been aware of the problem, but decided to keep the “faulty” cards in the channel. We were told that all HD 3850 512 MB cards shipped between January and July are defective as well as a substantial number of HD 3870 512 MB cards and X2 models. All cards lack power management features; the 3850s were identified to have quality issues with poor soldering and integrated memory problems while the 3870s were delivered with a wrong resistor value, which can result in computers not starting up and system crashes.

The whole issue was amplified through a complaint by Alienware, which, according to sources, returned all graphics cards it had purchased from Diamond Multimedia. The system builder found failure rates of more than 10% with X2 cards, more than 2% with 3870 models and almost 8% for 3850 versions. Especially problematic were artifacts in common games as well as system crashes.

You can read the entire article at TG Daily.