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Diamond Multimedia Says that Only 188 of Its Cards are Defective

Paul Lilly — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:27:47 -0500

Earlier this week, it came to light that Diamond Multimedia had shipped some defective videocards, and one rumor estimated the number of bad parts might be as high as 20,000, but Diamond Multimedia claims that number is greatly exaggerated. In fact, Bruce Zaman, a spokesman for Diamond Multimedia, said that only 188 videocards based on ATI's Radeon 3800 series were found to be faulty, and that the problem, which stemmed from inappropriate resistors, has been resolved.

So where did the estimate of 20,000 bad parts come from? Diamond Multimedia claims it was the result of false information being spread by one of its former employees who became intent on creating bad publicity for the company, and that the ex-employee in question was a former engineer among those responsible for the bad parts to begin with.

“The source of this article, after agreeing in writing and verbally to not denigrate their employment with Diamond or divulge any company data or proprietary information such as sources, customers and internal procedures did exactly that,” Mr. Zaman stated."

Whatever the real number of bad parts, it appears Alienware has jumped ship for good. This too holds a conspiracy theory twist, as Zaman claims Alienware's decision to end its relationship was because the company received "tainted data from [its] engineer," and that Alienware was further put off by the time it took the engineer to fix the problem.

Drama, anyone?

Image Credit: Diamond Multimedia

Rumor: Thousands of Diamond Multimedia Cards May be Defective

Paul Lilly — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:35:12 -0500

The timing couldn't be worse on this one for ATI, who has crawled its way back into contention with Nvidia's best silicon, and received a further consumer boost while enthusiasts remain weary over Nvidia's GPU problems. Now the rumor mill is spinning in ATI's direction, and citing "industry sources," TG Daily says that Diamond Multimedia have have shipped upwards of 20,000 defective HD 3800 series videocards. That's a lot of GPUS.

But it gets even worse. According to the rumor, Diamond Multimedia knew about the problem all along but decided not to pull the faulty cards from store shelves. Allegedly all HD 3850 512MB cards shipped between January and July suffer the manufacturing defect, while a "substantial number" of HD 3870 512MB and X2 videocards also show signs of poor soldering and integrated memory problems.

The issue supposedly came to light when Alienware returned its graphics cards it had purchased from Diamond Multimedia after finding failure rates to the tune of 10 percent, or so the sources say. Seemingly giving the rumor some merit, TG Daily claims Bruce Zaman, CEO of Diamond Multimedia, confirmed that there has been an isolated issue "with one vendor."

Sound familiar anyone?

Image Credit: Diamond Multimedia

Super RV770 in Diamond's Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition

Chris Moody — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:19:36 -0500

The buzz is flying about AMD’s “Super R770” and the possibility that it will snatch the GPU crown from Nvidia’s GeForce GTX series. As Editor-in Chief, Will Smith reported at the end of June, “ATI eschewed the huge, hot monolithic GPU for a more compact, but modular core. With twin goals of decreased power consumption and more efficiency per die area, ATI looks poised to dethrone Nvidia” and later said, “The Radeon 4870 runs nearly as fast as a GTX 280 in most benchmarks for about 60% of the cost.”

The "Super RV770" will arrive with water-cooling pre-installed and an unlocked BIOS, which enables the GPU to be pushed all the way to 950 MHz and the memory to 4.8 GT/s According to some sources, you may be able to push the GPU beyond 1 GHz, using TEC elements, and keep the temperature of GPU low. Don’t look for this unit in retail; it is an AIB/OEM-only product.

So how long do you have to wait? Diamond already has one ready to come out, the Diamond Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition. According to TechPowerUp.com Smoothcreations will be offering a water cooled edition soon in it’s systems. Check this out from Diamond's press release:

The HD 4870 is a smoking gun dual slot card, PCIE 2.0, with 512MB of DDR5 memory and a clock speed of 800 MHz. The memory speed is 1100 MHz and is designed with 800 stream processors. The HD 4870 provides plug-and-play ATI CrossFireX™ upgradeability with up to quad-GPU support. Continuing with ATI’s Power Play and 55nm processing technology, this card is the fastest and efficient. “The Diamond Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition was clocked to kick some ass”. We didn’t just want a fast card out in the market, we wanted the fastest card that could kick the living daylights and bust some performance records, say Mario Gastelum, Director of Product Development & Engineering. “we wanted a card that kicked the competitions teeth into the curb”, and that’s exactly what our engineers accomplished”. “The firmware was custom designed to enable end users to go beyond the normal over clocked speeds and allow them to push their cards for higher performance via the catalyst control center.” The GPU’s custom firmware has been unlocked to push cards to GPU settings of up to 950 Mhz and Memory of up 1200 Mhz.

We’ll be the judge of whether it “kicks some ass” or not, thank you very much. I certainly like what I am hearing about it, and I can’t wait to see how it compares to Nvidia’s GTX 280. ATI Fanbois may have something to crow about at last.

Back From the Dead: AMD Resurrects ATI's All-In-Wonder Series

Paul Lilly — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:53:08 -0500

With home theater PCs becoming increasing commonplace and the line between computers and fully fledged media centers continuing to blur, we can't think of a better time for AMD to bring back ATI's once popular All-In-Wonder series. Apparently AMD has seen the writing on the wall too, and today announced the AIW's return, now with HD.

If you can't remember anything about the All-In-Wonder series and why it was so popular, don't feel bad - it's been two years since we last saw a videocard sporting the AIW moniker. That will soon change, as both Diamond Multimedia and VisionTek have jumped on board to offer AIW videocards by late July. All-In-Wonder HD videocards will come equipped with ATI's Theater 650 Pro hardware MPEG-2 encoding technology, which will allow for recording of both HDTV and analog programming, while also maintaining ATI's unified video decoder (UVD) technology to offset cycling chores from the processor to the GPU. On the software front, AIW cards will come with ATI's Catalyst Media Center. Dolby 5.1 Digital surround sound via HDMI and a dual-link DVI port round out the accouterment of goodies. First run AIW cards are rumored to center around the HD 3650 GPU, but if past products are any indication, expect to see higher end videocards also touting the AIW label before long.

Image Credit: ATI