Chicago (IL) – This story has all the signs of becoming an entertaining soap opera for bystanders and a big mess for everyone affected by the events. Following a conversation yesterday and an article thereafter, Diamond’s chief executive officer followed up with us that far less graphics cards are faulty than claimed by an industry source, which said that more than 15,000 cards with design or manufacturing errors may have been sold or are still in channel. Is this your typical story how to make an elephant out of a mouse?

It was clear that Bruce Zaman was not especially happy about a story we ran yesterday and updated early this morning. According to industry sources, there may be lots of faulty Diamond graphics cards in the market and consumers may be ending up with such a card. Zaman limited the information on this matter to standard phrases two days ago, but followed up today.

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. He conceded that there was an issue, but Diamond worked on the problem and eventually solved it. However, Alienware was already gone at that point.

Zaman claims that this is really part of the entire story and he obviously was upset that the names of the firm’s customers were leaked to numerous media outlets. In an email sent to TG Daily, Zaman noted that the true problem in regard to Alienware was that the company received “tainted data from [its] engineer” and that it took that engineer “suspiciously” long to find the problem with the graphics cards. Zaman said that not the hardware problem in itself, but the time it took the engineer to fix the issue was the reason why it lost Alienware as a customer.

In a phone conversation, Zaman confirmed that the engineered was “fired” as a result of the events and the belief that he provided the company with false credentials.

Make that 190

Sep 25, 2008 13:34     

I bought 2 3870's with that problem... they wouldn't work on certain board... so they told me that my board was defective (4 boards, a PSU and some other parts later) it was still their cards like I thought all along... but they still wouldn't let me RMA them.
Suavey report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

scared me out of a purchase

Sep 25, 2008 15:38     

i'll just buy a PNY or Sapphire card than. prolly a 4870 instead of those 3870.
Jonas report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

RE: Make that 190

Sep 26, 2008 05:26     

Blaming other components is the classic way of avoiding responsibility. Not allowing customers to RMA is the best way Diamond Multimedia can give itself a bad name in the business and drive itself out of the business. Today, I would never buy DM anyway. Somehow my instincts tell me it's best to avoid them and go with ATI directly. Forget the third party makers.
Cypherdude report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +2

nvidia insider

Sep 26, 2008 12:37     

nvidia sent there engineer but he only managed to penetrate Diamond and not ATi, nvidia wants its revenge back on all the exposure everyone gave including amd/ati partners of nvidias line of cards which are all faulty (g8/g9/gt200 etc) lol. nvidia never forgets its enemy's and will even attempt assassination, if it could get away with it.
x1reme report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0