There are two ways you get a gaming PC. You either shop for all its components and build it yourself, or buy one pre-buit from a company in the business of selling them. Alienware is one such company. One of the differences between the two modes of getting a gaming PC is that if you find that a component is faulty, within a period, you could return the faulty part to the retailer for a replacement. With pre-built PCs, the whole unit has to be sent to a service center, for them to diagnose the fault and replace parts.

Diamond Multimedia, popular for its ATI graphics accelerators have allegedly pumped anywhere between 15,000 and 20,000 defective graphics cards using the Radeon HD 3800 series SKUs between the months of January and July, 2008, through OEM channels. As as a report from TG Daily finds out, it may be more of a case specific to Diamond and its manufacturing sources, particularly Info-Tek Corporation (ITC). Alienware has alleged that a disturbingly high amount of graphics card related failures have been noticed with its products. The system builder found failure rates of more than 10% with HD 3870 X2 cards, more than 2% with 3870 models and almost 8% for 3850 versions. Problems included random crashes and artifacts. These problems may have been caused because of the cards lacking power-management features (for the HD 3850), resistors with wrong values (for HD 3870). The source of the problems may have been traced to ITC, one of the manufacturers that has contracts with Diamond. Diamond itself is also to blame, since clearly its product testing, quality assurance teams have been sleeping on the job. This just might cost Diamond its supply contract with Alienware.