Thousands of Diamond Multimedia HD 3800-series Potentially Defective

According an an industry source close to TG Daily, it appears that Diamond Multimedia have a rather significant problem on their hands, although right now they seem to be taking it in stride. It turns out that between 15,000 and 20,000 of their HD 3800 cards left the factory with manufacturing defects. Those include poor soldering, memory issues and in some cases, temperature issues.

Most of the GPUs have been shipped to regular consumers, but Alienware is the one who experienced the issues first-hand, and as a result of their testing, they had to return over 2,600 of these faulty GPUs back to Diamond. Even worse, in a previous instance, Alienware had found that 100% of the GPUs they received from Diamond were defective.

What’s important to note, however, is that Diamond weren’t the ones to manufacture these cards. In this case, it was one of their contractors, ITC, which is likely where the problem was created. The problem gets worse though, because the cards were not qualified by AMD, so some are claiming negligence in evaluation and testing.

Diamond is claiming that the return rates on the cards are extremely low, and that the problem with Alienware was due to their power supply of choice. But the fact of the matter is, the cards were proven to be faulty, and worse still, thousands have been sold, and the same product is still available through popular e-tailers like NewEgg. Should Diamond admit the problem and recall the cards? It would be the right thing to do, without question, but given they aren’t a huge company, something like that could really set them back. Sticky situation, that’s for sure.

Yes, it would have been the honorable thing to do, but this is a business world. A recall would have been a suicide business-decision since replacing 15,000 graphics cards can easily bankrupt a company like Diamond. We hear that Diamond is stuck between a rock and a hard place and was in no position to shoulder the cost of a recall due to a business agreement with GeCube.