Thousands of DiamondMM Radeon 3870 prone to failure

TGDaily posted an interesting story today. Shortly after that news item was posted we received documentation from several sources confirming that a lot of Radeon HD 3870 cards might be defective.

In particular we received a document which originated from Alienware who used these cards, questioning the high failure rate of the cards. Diamond Multimedia may have shipped between 15,000 and 20,000 AMD/ATI HD 3800-series with design/manufacturing defects to system builders and the retail market. Between January and July of this year more than 15,000 units may have ended up in customer hands or are still being sold. Diamond denied that there is a problem with its cards, but confirmed that there was an isolated problem with one system builder earlier this year.

According to our industry source, Diamond Multimedia has been aware of the problem, but decided to keep the