Ah, this is why we love the Internet and its ability to spread stories at such speed.  On Wednesday TGDaily reported that “thousands of Diamond multimedia graphics cards potentially defective” and that the company “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.”  Of course as you’d imagine the S hit the F after that and since then some of the information has been adjusted.

Diamond Multimedia|ATI|Graphics Card|Video Card|56K Modems

Today at TGDaily, this is the headline: “Diamond Multimedia says only 188 cards faulty, not thousands”.  Huh quite the difference….
Chicago (IL) – This story has all the signs of becoming an entertaining soap opera for bystanders and a big mess for everyone affected by the events. Following a conversation yesterday and an article thereafter, Diamond’s chief executive officer followed up with us that far less graphics cards are faulty than claimed by an industry source, which said that more than 15,000 cards with design or manufacturing errors may have been sold or are still in channel. Is this your typical story how to make an elephant out of a mouse?

It was clear that Bruce Zaman was not especially happy about a story we ran yesterday and updated early this morning. According to industry sources, there may be lots of faulty Diamond graphics cards in the market and consumers may be ending up with such a card. Zaman limited the information on this matter to standard phrases two days ago, but followed up today.

While documents TG Daily has seen indicate that Alienware found higher than usual failure rates with Diamond’s cards and ended up returning its entire lot of more than 2600 graphics cards and eventually dropped Diamond as a supplier, Zaman said only 188 cards “out of many thousands that were shipped” were found to have caused problems. He conceded that there was an issue, but Diamond worked on the problem and eventually solved it. However, Alienware was already gone at that point.