14 DAY TRIAL // Recently, on-line media was alerted about the news that ATI based graphics chips were reported failing on the field at higher than expected rates. While some were probably expecting the situation to escalate, less than a week since we learned about the issue, the company involved seems to have already solved the problem. We are talking here about Diamond Multimedia and a lot of faulty chips delivered to Alienware.
The initial news stated that around 15,000 to 20,000 cards were suspected as being defective. These cards were not manufactured by Diamond itself, but by one of its partners, ITC, also known under the brand name GeCube. The suspicions cards included defective materials, a human mistake involving one of the engineers or a bad BIOS. Detailed research on the story unveiled the fact that only some 3800 cards were defective, namely those shipped to Alienware.
Diamond announced that it took the entire blame for the issue and that any owner of a defective card should contact the company right away to solve the problem. Of course that reports of failing cards surfaced right away. It seems that one user said that the card crashed even when idle and that it had to be underclocked to run specific games.
Unhappy with the entire situation, Bruce Zaman, Diamond’s chief executive officer, announced that the problem had been solved in the meantime. Even so, Alienware shipped back an entire lot of 2600 cards believed to be defective and also ended the partnership with Diamond. After digging the problem in, only 188 chips were actually found featuring defective parts and not thousands as initially reported. On the one hand, this is good news; on the other hand, Diamond lost a lot of its credibility and one of its major customers.
According to Zaman, the reason Alienware dropped its supplier was not the defective cards issue, but the fact that the company did not find the problem in due time. And the executive officer points the finger at the engineer responsible with finding the problem, who was fired in the meantime. As Zaman is said to have stated, the actual problem with Alienware was that the company received “tainted data from [its] engineer” and that the engineer needed “suspiciously” long time to find the problem with the graphics cards. This engineer is said to have provided false credentials to the company.
According to TGDaily, Diamond's answer to the entire situation was, “After investigating our Customer Service logs, we did uncover an isolated issue with one OEM manufacturer relating to a power supply being used. The issue was identified and corrected. We do not have any extraordinary customer call reports for HD 3850, 3870 512 MB boards. Diamond manufactures the most reliable graphics cards in the industry and our customers' satisfaction is our first priority. Diamond has always been about customer service and cares about maintaining good standing relationships with OEM manufacturers”.