'Thousands' of Diamond 3800 cards potentially defective

TG Daily is reporting that 15,000-20,000 Diamond Radeon HD 3850, 3870, and 3870 X2 cards may potentially be defective. According to their sources, the cards suffer from a variety of problems. For instance, the 3850 cards suffer from poor soldering and memory issues, while the 3870s were shipped with the wrong resistor value. Apparently all of the cards lack power management features.

The Diamond cards were shipped between January and July of this year, and were actually manufactured by Diamond's contract manufacturer, GeCube. For those of you who don't know, many of ATI and NVIDIA's board partners actually outsource all their board production to a handful of companies. All 4870 X2 cards for instance are manufactured by Sapphire's parent company, PC Partner. Companies like Diamond will then purchase the boards and put their own unique stamp on them by OC'ing or adding custom cooling.

It's unknown how many defective boards are actually out there in the channel. Many of the boards were actually shipped to Alienware, who found failure rates as high as 10% for the Radeon 3870 X2, 8% for the 3850 512MB, and 2% for the 3870 512MB. Apparently Alienware shipped the boards back to Diamond and ended their relationship with the company.

Diamond will not be issuing a product recall, instead customers with affected boards should contact Diamond directly for a replacement card.