Video

Defective Radeons? No way!

The rumors were false

By Alexandru Pancescu, Hardware Editor

9th of August 2007, 13:21 GMT

Adjust text size:

Rumors surfaced on many news web sites about a batch of defective Radeon video chips that AMD's graphics division (formerly the ATI company) shipped to several hardware manufacturers. The rumors spoke about a defect in the BIOS chip of several thousands Radeon HD 2600 and HD 2400 graphics chips due to a faulty flashing procedure that left the cards unable to use their UVD

units.

According to the news site DailyTech, the whole situation is a huge misunderstanding and while the site DigiTimes states that "One first-tier maker has recalled over 20,000-30,000 units already, noted the sources", all hardware manufacturers that were named in the original article denied having received any faulty batch of AMD made graphics chips. Among those manufacturers and vendors there are big names on the graphics cards market like Asustek Computers, Micro-Star International (better known as MSI) and Gigabyte Technology.

Talking to a graphics adapter engineer from one of the afore mentioned hardware manufacturers revealed an interesting situation: "ATI did deliver some chips without UVD to Acer for one of its projects and that's it. All chips delivered to other OEM and ODM has the UVD enabled". Acer is one of the most important branded PC vendors in the world and the company has a long history of ordering some hardware products with certain features disabled for their low cost market. So this may be the starting point of all these rumors.

According to the other hardware manufacturers, they have no knowledge of faulty Radeon chips as their internal testings revealed no problem whatsoever with the BIOS or the UVD (Universal Video Decoder) unit. "We can confirm that all shipping AMD Radeon HD 2400s and ATI Radeon HD 2600s have working UVD functionality," stated a Gigabyte spokesperson. "We are shipping a number of HD 2400 A13s and their UVD functionality is enabled in the August Catalyst driver drop. All of the remaining HD 2400s, and all of the HD 2600s, have UVD support in the current driver." At the same time, an AMD employee said that his company had no problems with the UVD units for the Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 series and more so no faulty components would leave the factory. "Any report claiming that defective HD 2600 and 2400 [cards] are recalled in the channel is completely untrue".

TAGS:

AMD | ATI | Radeon | Bios | defective

SEARCH THE NEWS ARCHIVE :

Today's News | Yesterday's News | News Archive

User opinions:

No user comments yet.

Be the first to express your opinion using the form below!

Share your opinion:

SUBMIT PROGRAM \| ADVERTISE \| GET HELP \| SEND US FEEDBACK \| RSS FEEDS \| ENTER NEWS SITE \| ENGLISH BOARD \| ROMANIAN FORUM
© 2001 - 2008 Softpedia. All rights reserved. Softpedia™ and the Softpedia™ logo are registered trademarks of SoftNews NET SRL.	Copyright Information \| Privacy Policy \| Terms of Use \| Update your software \| Archive

NEWS CATEGORIES: