According to some rumors circulating through the back channels of the graphics card market, AMD may have let slipped to system integrators a number of video cards with a busted BIOS chip. This happened because the company's official graphics card diagnostic and validation software was discovered to have a bug that prevented the correct validation of ATI Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 graphics cards, says the news site DigiTimes. Even if the problem can be fixed easily - as channel vendors said that it is only an error in the BIOS uploading process, that can be fixed by reapplying the BIOS software - since AMD did not detect the problem in time a huge number of graphics cards will have to be recalled from hardware manufacturers like Asustek Computer, Micro-Star International (MSI for short) and Gigabyte Technology.

An estimated number of 20,000 to 30,000 units were already recalled, but that still means that most of the defective cards are still out there, even if according to sources, only a few were sold to end users. AMD's response to this problem was that all new Radeon cards were carefully inspected and that the incident was an isolated one and will be solved very soon. Another brand new rumor says that the manufacturing company, AMD, is planning to sell some defective graphics cards as low end products on emerging markets. These cards are all based on the R610 video chips and some earlier revision of this model, namely the A13, has a bug that prevents the Unified Video Decoder (UVD for short) from working properly.

While the current R610 revisions, A14 and A15, have good working UVDs, the A13 can not be repaired, so AMD is thinking to sell them as low price, entry level graphics cards. The Radeon HD 2400 cards that have a disabled UVD are aimed at "markets with large potential but low financial possibilities" according to the site TCMagazine. Fortunately for AMD, the A13 revision of their R610 graphics chip has no other faults besides lacking the UVD function.