Diamond Says 188 Cards Faulty, Not Thousands

Last Wednesday, I posted a story regarding thousands of Diamond Multimedia ATI cards that might be defective, and since then, there has been many updates. The day after that news was posted, TG Daily followed-up their coverage by relaying the message from Diamond that only 188 cards were faulty, not “thousands”.

The explanation is that while Alienware sent back 2,600 GPUs, only a relative handful were defective. In Alienware’s case, it was much easier to send back the entire lot than test out each card individually before doing something with it. The CEO of Diamond, Bruce Zaman, also stresses that the cards sold to the regular consumer doesn’t show a higher RMA rate than is normal.

Our friends at Tech Report received an e-mail from Zaman late last week that claimed the company had been hit by fraud. To grab a quote, “A disgruntled former employee, who was terminated due to presenting fraudulent credentials, reported the story. When this person was unable to solve a very minor problem that affected less than 200 cards, many red flags were sent up, resulting in an investigation and termination.“

Is this the end of it? Hard to say, but the fact is that the supposed faulty models from Diamond have been in circulation in a while, and if there were problems with “thousands”, we probably would have heard about it by now. We’ll have to give it another year.

While documents TG Daily has seen indicate that Alienware found higher than usual failure rates with Diamond’s cards and ended up returning its entire lot of more than 2600 graphics cards and eventually dropped Diamond as a supplier, Zaman said only 188 cards “out of many thousands that were shipped” were found to have caused problems.