It was earlier reported (as early as yesterday), that Diamond Multimedia may have sold thousands of defective graphics cards through OEM / OEI channels. Diamond, on its part has responded to the original report, saying that only 188 units were defective in reality, not thousands, as alleged.

Bruce Zaman, CEO for Diamond responded to the TG Daily article, saying that only 188 units out of the thousands shipped were found with defects, and that the figures put up by an engineer at Alienware were incorrect as it was later found. Those were the figures and data the original report on this whole controversy was built on. Zaman said that not the hardware problem in itself, but the time it took the engineer to fix the issue was the reason why it lost Alienware as a customer. Zaman added, that the engineer was fired, for not only playing a key role in the whole controversy, but also for allegedly providing the company with false credentials.

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.

Being a niché product is never easy unless you pack what the public likes into a product. A graphics card, a sound card (HDMI output), a HD-DVR TV tuner, all rolled into one: ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder HD. This graphics card features ATI Theater 600 chip, a graphics core based on the RV635 (Radeon HD 3650).

Diamond Multimedia launched two products, the All-in-Wonder and the All-in-Wonder HD Premium, with the Premium featuring an expansion bracket with additional connectors. For more details, please visit the product page here.

As we reported earlier here Diamond Multimedia is preparing a special unlocked Black Edition Radeon HD 4870 card. We just received a first picture:

The RV770 is perhaps the best thing that happened to AMD in a long while. But more than AMD, it's perhaps the best thing that happened to us, the consumers. But general product launches seem to be just the tip of the ice-berg. The new PCB's designed by ATI for RV770 cards are actually running at well below the clock speed they can support and there is every reason to believe that these cards will be challenging NVIDIA's very best.

The HD4870 PCB with two 6-pin power connectors can support a maximum TDP of 225W (2x 75W from the power connectors + 75W from the PCI-Express interface). While at stock parameters, the HD4870 will not consume over 170W, it implies that with a fair bit of binning for high-performing parts, there is a serious lot of room for overclocking way beyond what the ordinary HD4870 cards can take.

Diamond Multimedia (www.diamondmm.com), a leading manufacturer of PC graphics cards, sound cards and communications products, launched today along with boutique system builder Smoothcreations, and Water cooling mavens, Danger Den the ATI Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition graphics card. This card offers exquisite gaming capabilities combined with state of the art efficiency.

The HD 4870 is a smoking gun dual slot card, PCIE 2.0, with 512MB of DDR5 memory and a clock speed of 800 MHz. The memory speed is 1100 MHz and is designed with 800 stream processors. The HD 4870 provides plug-and-play ATI CrossFireX upgradeability with up to quad-GPU support. Continuing with ATI's Power Play and 55nm processing technology, this card is the fastest and efficient. "The Diamond Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition was clocked to kick some ass". We didn't just want a fast card out in the market, we wanted the fastest card that could kick the living daylights and bust some performance records, say Mario Gastelum, Director of Product Development & Engineering. "we wanted a card that kicked the competitions teeth into the curb", and that's exactly what our engineers accomplished". "The firmware was custom designed to enable end users to go beyond the normal over clocked speeds and allow them to push their cards for higher performance via the catalyst control center." The GPU's custom firmware has been unlocked to push cards to GPU settings of up to 950 MHz and Memory of up 1200 MHz.

Update: Diamond has decided to make "these cards available in ecommerce in the next few days".

Diamond Multimedia introduced today the 1 gigabyte, overclocked version of the ATI Radeon HD 3870 graphics card. This card offers maximum speed and power at an incredible value. Utilizing 55nm technology, this card runs cool and quiet.

The HD 3870 is a dual slot card, PCIE 2.0, with 1024MB of DDR3 memory and an overclocked speed of 825 MHz. The memory speed is 900 MHz. As with the original HD 3870, the 1 gigabyte version is designed with 320 stream processors and plug-and-play ATI CrossFireX upgradeability with up to quad-GPU support.

How this happened is a bit of a mystery, but Diamond, a company best known for manufacturing ATI Radeon graphics cards, somehow managed to print the THX logo on its HD 3850 packaging - despite the fact that none of the company's products have ever featured the technology. Diamond simply puts it down to a mistake by a former employee, so if you see a Diamond 3850 in BestBuy which claims to come equipped with THX, don't get too excited. The company posted a statement online saying:

It came to our attention that the "THX" logo mistakenly has been printed on 3850 box. This mistake happened as result of misunderstanding of former employee. This is to confirm that this product and or any other Diamond's products have ever supported "THX". This mistake has been corrected.

So which other companies are advertising features that they don't actually offer?!

Diamond Multimedia has made a big impact on the graphics card market with their lineup of Radeon video cards a while back and it was the first to announce the launch of Radeon HD2900XT 1GB just recently. Diamond now has plans on a new platform called xDNA. xDNA enables users to run a CrossFire setup on any chipset, and that includes NVIDIA chipsets. Users can pick almost any motherboard with any socket, fit it with two Diamond Radeon cards and run CrossFire on it using Diamond's xDNA technology.

Diamond is known in the video card making world as the guy who puts a lot of memory into their products. Diamond is continuing that legacy by developing the VFX 2000 card, which is the workstation version of the HD 2900XT. What makes this card so special is the raw amount of DDR4 onboard: 2GB. There is no word as to how much this card will cost, how fast the RAM and GPU run at, but we do know that we will find out within the next couple of weeks.

Diamond Multimedia is now shipping AGP versions of ATI Radeon X1950PRO graphics. This card uses the Radeon X1950 GPU and comes with 512MB GDDR3 memory. It has a core clock speed of 575MHz and a 1.38GHz memory speed. It supports Dual DVI (x2 Dual-link), HDTV, D-sub and VIVO. The AGP model of Viper X1950PRO supports DirectX 9, Shader Model 3.0, High Dynamic Range (HDR) with full post-processing capabilities and built-in native HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection). It is Microsoft Windows Vista ready and supported by Catalyst Control Center. All Diamond video cards also carry the Diamond guarantee of quality assurance. The X1950PRO retails at $279 for PCI-E, and $299 for AGP.