- Sunday, 29 November 2009
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
The INQUIRER? That's my home page... - Intel field sales engineer
ATI 3870s fail too
EVERY TIME WE write something about Nvidia's woeful reliability record and honest communications, the fanbios come out of the woodwork and ask "what about the bad ATI cards?" We have spent months looking for such beasts, and eventually found out the source of those whispers, but it isn't ATI.
There are bad 3870s, no question there, documents seen by the Inquirer show that there was unquestionably a large number of potentially flaky parts sent out by at least one board maker and sold by one OEM. The question of why and how gets really murky really fast however, and there is no smoking gun.
The companies in question are Diamond, Alienware, GeCube and ATI. The parts are the 3870, first and second revision, the 3870 X2, and potentially some 3850s. What happened is that Alienware got a large batch of Diamond cards, and they started failing at higher than normal rates, between two per cent and, in some cases, slightly above 10 per cent. Quite unacceptable.
There were three causes for the problems: a wrong resistor, a questionable BIOS, and a PSU that wasn't delivering anything close to its rated wattage. Users saw dead cards, cards that would artifact, BSODs, and Crossfire that simply didn't work. None of these things – causes or symptoms – are a good thing.
You may or may not realise it, but Diamond doesn't make cards, they buy cards from large board makers. This is very common, most GPU sellers in fact do not make their own boards, they contract out to large Taiwanese OEMs, or in some cases, rival board makers.
Here is where the finger pointing starts. As far as we can trace it, the boards appear to be made for Diamond by GeCube, nothing unusual there. Other makers have also made Diamond boards in the past as well. These were then sold to Alienware to be put in their machines, and again, business as usual.
Some blame GeCube for sub-standard boards. Others blame Diamond for installing a substandard BIOS. The boards that Alienware qualified were not the same boards as were delivered for production, and those changed in the middle of the run.
Did GeCube change production without telling Diamond? Did Diamond order a change? Did some engineer take it upon him/herself to save few dollars? This part is totally unclear, and will likely never be answered fully, but there were several changes, and they had a detrimental effect.
The cards started dying, both in burn-in/power-on testing, and in user hands. Most runs were around fice per cent bad or less, with a single small run of parts much higher than that. In total, a few thousand cards were directly caught, and sources say the number of cards potentially affected are between 10,000 and 20,000.
Keep in mind that of these, about five per cent are bad, likely less. Again taking the worst case of 20,000 bad parts, and it isn't that high, this means there are about 1,000 bad cards manufactured, and most of those were caught and or reworked before release.
To put it in perspective, there were way way more than a million 38xx parts sold, and some sources put the number much closer to two million than one. Even if there were only one million sold, that would put the bad run of parts at two per cent of the total made, and of that five per cent, or one tenth of a percent failed.
Another thing to realise is that these parts are most definitely not the reference design made by ATI. An ODM or AIB changed something, or somethings, that they should not have, and that lead to problems. The stock parts are fine, and no other vendor that we talked to had heard of the problems, so they look to have been contained to a single run, caught and mostly fixed before many got into the wild.
Diamond isn't shirking responsibility like certain competing GPU vendors out there, and if you have one of these cards, you should contact them so they can make things right. In any case, due to the tiny number of bad parts out there, it is unlikely that you will ever see one, much less have one die on you. A tenth of a percent is a pretty small number.
So, if you hear rumors about bad 3870s or X2s, now you know why. They do exist, and they do fail, artifact, and some won't run 3DMark as is whispered around. Unlike certain other companies, if you are one of the unlucky 1,000 or so, likely far less, you will probably be taken good care of, not stonewalled like the other guys. µ
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
that I'm very pleased with my choice of ditching nVIDIA for ATI back in the X800 days.

As of that card I've only bought ATI cards and I haven't regretted it once.

Never had a BSOD in any game what so ever which cannot be said with any nVIDIA card I've tried and I don't OC any components either so that is not to be blamed.

My 3870 works flawlessly in my parents PC now and the new 4850 replaced my old-and-still-functioning X800.

DAMMiT is and will be my choice for GPUs.
Long Live Ati and there dominence of the GPU realm, especialy there consumer support.
After reading the INQUIRER for many many years, I agree with alot of Charlies rants (although I like Vista), I've decided Charlie writes articles because he loves to be flamed.

I'm waiting for Nvidia fan boys to have their say
My HIS 3870x2 flunked out after about 2 months of use...

Got 4870 now, best card ever used.
Charlie proved to us he can do some serious research if he wants... and push it forward before starting to spread bullents and fire ;)
Charlie while I frequent your columns and generally agree with what you have to say, was there any need for such a long winded explanation that could of been surmised in a paragraph. Your usually more succinct and direct to the point than this charlie. :P

"ATI's GPU themselves are perfectly fine, however Diamond strayed from the stock reference board and as result stuffed up badly. This is not a GPU related issue like Nvidia's GPU issue, so don't get your panties in a knot people, just breath and relax. And NVidiot's this is not a excuse to run your mouths its not an applicable comparison to the Nvidia issue where the vast majority of their GPU's are effected" 


Something like that Charlie, Short, Sweet & Succinct and no room for confusion or truth bending on the nvidia fanboi's behalf. All they understand is marketing charlie and have very short attention spans. If you don't keep it short and sweet for them the message gets lost! LOL 
What, the fanbois are not crawling out of the woodworks to make grossly misinformed and badly argumented knee-jerk claims about how Charlie is going easy on ATI and always exaggerating with Nvidia ?

Or could it be that ATI doesn't actually have anything to with the issue, and that is cutting their feet from under their would-be arguments ? Bah, since when has logic ever stopped a fanbois from whipping up a rage ?

Personally I like to see any vendor get his comeuppance when he screws up. I've bought a lot more GeForce cards than I have Radeons, but I still want it pointed out when my preferred vendor is screwing the pooch.
If it hadn't been for Charlie, I'd have probably bought a GTX280, and I'd be wondering now when it will fail.
yes I am here
so if I get a bad ATI card I will be
"taken care of" yeah right. 
In other words it had better be in warranty and go back to the manufacturer of your card!
I still have scars from dealing with Rage cards.

I would love to see how many digits the cheque from AMD/ATI is to Charlie each month! :)
"Long Live Ati and there dominence of the GPU realm..."
posted by : Dorian, 24 September 2008 


Larrabeeeeeee!!!
Bias article once again Charlie. 

Now all you need to do is a article on the massive 48xx series problem, AKA atikmdag problem. With many cards not working properly on Vista, with the Display Driver crashing. 


Just SOME of the threads about it:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17886996&page=1

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=229&threadid=95563

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=266520

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=235362

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/1026966.html

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/243033-15-atikmdag-problem

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/253529-15-error-display-driver-atikmdag-stopped-responding-driver



I've had a 4870 and 4870X2 and this happened with both.
to do is buy from the right OEM. I've only bought BFG cards, going back to the 5900XT OC, and never had a warranty (which is lifetime, I still have it's replacement, a 6600GT OC) issue. Of course my 9700 died, but the warranty had expired.

I guess I was taken care of by the Nvidia OEM and f*cked in the a$$ by ATI according to Charlie's logic. That is, unless, an ATI OEM is offering lifetime warranties now?

Didn't think so. Also, who's jumping ship Charlie, haven't seen any Nvidia OEM's running away like you predicted...
first off, the fanboy term is overrated.
2nd, Just like that other tech news website you and i know, when dammit does something wrong they're the unlucky poor folks and when nv does it, they're the should-be-hanged saitan.
3rd, all of the current gpu products in the world are defective because you're an end-user who was told too much about the non-of-your-business, so don't use gpus till larabee arrives.
I have a DIAMOND 3870 and it works fine.
It actually replaced a DOA saphire 3870.
The diamond runs like a champ. As for the Saphire, thats the second bad card and I had a bad board from them too so they are done.

I really wanted to say although I love ATI, and only buy them. The whole power play and fan control is terrible on the 3800 series. They need to make it unified among the partners. It is unacceptable how bad it was. The fan never spun higher than 40% despite heat. And the powerplay would rarely drop frames in game.
And for the love of god please get the linux drivers working right. Compiz is a mess with ATI and makes scrolling though websites impossible with it enabled.
My personal experience:

Nvidia Geforce 2 MX400 - dead
Nvidia Geforce FX 5200 - works
Nvidia Geforce 6800 - worked with artifacts but I lowered the stock clock and solved.
Nvidia Geforce 7950GTX - dead, but was owners fault.
Nvidia Geforce 8800GT - works with artifacts but unusable.

ATI 9800 - works, but sometimes doesn't boot up properly.
ATI x800 - works
ATI 1950GT - works
ATI 2600XT - works

ati fail rate: 1 out of 4 (25%)
Nvidia fail rate: 4 out of 5 (80%) (not counting the 7950)

This isnt quite fair as I have way older Nvidia cards in the list, and I still want to give a chance to a high end ATI comparable to the 8800 and see. Its just my personal experience.

In the chipset arena I will drop nvidia, they didn't released AGP-CPU gate support for quad Phenom in Nforce3 so I'm just pissed off with them. My Asrock AM2NF3 would be working just fine with my AGP 1950GT and my Phenom 9550. But instead, thanks to nvidia, my AGP is working in PCI mode. Means a drop of 50% in performance aprox.
I got one of the 3870 ladies and the card is doing well since I bought it in March this year! I just tested the overclocking potential and had no problem getting it up to 855/1220 . Now the card runs in idle and I dont have any of the discribed issues. Yay ATI - you rock :>

cheers,
kreak

PS: I love my mail-address
Good Grief.


I've built more systems than I can count, since '94, and bad power supplies count for one hell of a lot of problems.

CoolerMaster make damn some good ones.

AOpen I'll never buy again.

and a Line Interactive UPS goes a long way to making machines keep working, too.

http://www.tripplite.com/ for the things

( APC used to engage in false advertising, then they did a lot of screaming about other companies, based on mis-quoting 'em, I've no trust for such antics )
The 48xx series (atikmdag) display driver problem... is just that, a DRIVER problem which can be fixed with a driver update.
Now as it seems, some of you haven't noticed that Charlie is referring to hardware COMPONENT problems which are hard/impossible to fix.
Advice to Nvidia fanbois: If you want to put some arguments in your comments, make them relevant, else you'll just end up being silly.
If you bothered to read half of those thread's, nVidia users are having similar problems but not as common. Looks like a Vista issue..
Charlie,

this is not the only fuck up ati made, especially the 4850 and 4870 have heat issues.

Since im not a fanboy and i swapped my 9600 gt for a 4870, i have had problems installing my 4870. after uninstalling my drivers from nvidia and installing the catalyst drivers he only recognized 100 of the 800 shaders. (whoops)

So i thought i RMA it, but to make sure it wasnt a software problem i reinstalled my vista. After that it did recognize all 800 shaders. Which leads me to the consistantly bad drivers of ati.

During catalyst 8.6 t/m 8.8 i ussually had a blue screen of death due to the bad drivers and bios, after catalyst 8.9 i havent had any problems but you can understand that if some comes asking for advice about what to put in their new gaming rig it wont be ATI unles he knows how to handle a PC.

Also a card that runs up to 100 degrees cant be good, most definitly not for the card and the heat it produces in your PC Case.

So you have to manually change the fan speed, which simple minded gamers cant understand.

So you have proven yet again to have some defective parts in your brain, by only wanting to remember what is good for ATI.
Where are the Nvidia fanboiz?

They're out there, somewhere... Unfortunately they're looking at a black screen, so they are unaware of this post.

Be vewy vewy quiet, and maybe they won't find out :-)

(Sorry, it just had to be said... hehe)
as you point out yourself. and according to the links you provided. it looks like the problem is in Vista. and ATI has done a lot to try and resolve the issue, or work around it. even though you should be barking at M$.

I have a HIS ATI Radeon HD 3870 XT ICEQ3 from overclockers and the fan cannot keep u with the heat, ended up setting the fan at 60% duty cycle just to keep th thin stable and they want me to send in for diagnostics and then possibly for a replacement from HIS, which could take up to a month. Totally unacceptable!!
The bottom line that Nvidia fanboys cannot spin around is the "wheel of time". Nvidia obviously have some issues with several of their products. No matter how it's buried under tons of fanboy spin and name calling, time will tell the truth. When these ticking time bombs finally go off it's going to be very bad for Nvidia.

I used to swear by Nvidia going back to the STB TNT AGP card. I've used many Nvidia products before switching to a X800. I'm currently using two 3870's in Crossfire mode in Vista64. I'm no fanboy but I do call things like I see them. 

It seems Nvidia fanboys are trying to topple our ever "friendly" cult of Jobs fan bots! The cult of Jobs better watch out because they have some competition at the moment.
"nvlddmkm" has caused an error- Nuff said! 
Too many links to post ;-)
Stupid partners cutting corners.

Guess who isn't going to get a good allocation of R770s?

Of course I wouldn't expect Charlie to put ATI in bad light in anything.

But do you want to hear a secret? All GPUs fail. Yes, no matter how good it is, some people get defective parts. I've had some too and when millions of these are sold, I guess many others get them every now and then as well.

Still, the Nvidia issue was way exaggerated and Charlie probably knows that even himself.

It doesn't go like "ok there were 1000 bad parts, so only they are defective". A good part of the millions of chips made are always broken and that's what we have to endure.
I've had Nvidia and ATI cards for some time - Dealing with the fallout of the Nvidia/HP/Dell laptop situation I know firsthand what misery is.

I bought a 4870 TOP card about 2 months ago - running Vista Ultimate 32bit I have not had one issue with the video card. I'm running the catalyst 8.8 drivers and everything works just fine. Perhaps those who deliberately "push" their systems may encounter issues - I don't.
I'm running a pair od Diamon 3870 X2s in Crossfire. Ive had them since the day they were released. Their clock speeds are maxed out in Overdrive and they run like a top.

Maybe in some later production runs there was some improptu parts changes initiated by the component suppliers?

After all, the parts cards are made in China, where they can even f*** up baby food.
B, Just a quick heads up on your post. I think you really need to read those forums you posted lnks to because NVIDIA are having just as many issues with this and their ntvkdm.sys. ATI and NVIDIA both currently suffer from an issue that's applicable to the use of dual monitors on Windows Vista 32/64 bit. And at this point neither company has done anything to rectify the issue. 

Didn't you read those forum links you posted their is plenty of nvidiot's in there with the same issues posting in the very same forums, as I said before its applicable to both not just ATI.

Everyone has the right to post but come on mate get the facts rights geez. You just waste peoples time and make yourself look stupid. 

And I certainly didn't get looked after. lots of money wasted but it didn't stop my buying a 4850
(which btw refuses to go above 680Mhz, even at 40deg with a duorb...)

Next we wait for the far cry 2 benchmarks... gtx vs 4870x2 of course.
I think Charlie should write about that too, after you write one about the number of times per day this happens to most people with nVidia cards and Vista.

Links are too numersous to list.

I think you have the answer to your problem hidden in your comment (hint - it's not really ATI): check the word you typed just before the comma.

Many articles have been written on driver problems with Vi$ta. In fact, I recall Charlie D penning some rather spirited investigations of this OS and it's suckiness.

I feel bad for kids who use whatever Vi$ta computer is around or adults who don't know better. From before the release of Vi$ta I was telling all my friends and family that "Vi$ta - no way, no day; XP Pro as long as possible." Who wants the driver hassles for a slick, poorly designed GUI with horrible DRM? And DirectX 10 isn't enough to make it worth while.

Good luck with your Vi$ta problem. I bet your ATI gear will run great on XP Pro if you get fed up troubleshooting ...
ATi and Nvidia are sold through the same channels. 

RMAs are return to either ATi or Nvidia through OEMs; not directly to ATi or Nvidia.

How can customers be taken care of differently between ATi and Nvidia?

Those who reads Charlie's articles and think he has any bit of professionalism as a reporter ought to get a brain scan.
ATI does bad cards
ATI is good

NVIDIA does bad cards
NVIDIA is bad

Strange.

It is also strange I did not read about the "FurMark .exe rename discovery on ATI cards" (30% performance loss - just because ATI is scared their cards go toast) or also the dreaded BSOD ATIans receive every day...

I am glad I take this site just for fun
Maybe it's just VISTA that sucks?
Not many, and customers taken care of. 

How funny, i was one of those customers that was supposedly taken care of, what a joke that was. it think i would have had better customer support from the guy driving around selling TV,s out of his van.

Nearly a 10 week turnaround and the worst communication.

Don't even get me started on 4870x2 and the great ATI drivers and support for this card.

This article is what you would expect from a biased publisher.

This is my first and last reply to a article from Charlie Demerjian as i have experienced it first hand.

Good bye
Gary
Driver problems constrained to Vista are just that. It'll be a few more years before it's stable....

Think I recall the Vista crash numbers released showed that Nvidia drivers were the cause of most of them.
B you should really read your own links because if you get faulty hardware out of those then you need glasses.

Most refer to problems on both Ati and Nvidia, or a range of cards not just the 4800's. and some have even found fixes for there problems.
Someone found something that doesn't work with VISTA?

Was that a typo?
My HIS 3870 pixelated after 3 months, worked great till then. HIS said they were more than happy to replace the card put here's the pitch that changed my mind. I was to send them my defective card and they'ed sand me a new one , but I had to pay for shipping, to Hong Kong, which is about $60 one way, so thats $120, I can buy a new one for almost that price, so I said forget it. I bought a 4870 instead.
How about a article on this?!?
Bias article once again Charlie. 

Now all you need to do is a article on the massive 48xx series problem, AKA atikmdag problem. With many cards not working properly on Vista, with the Display Driver crashing. 


Just SOME of the threads about it: 

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17886996&page=1 

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=229&threadid=95563 

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=266520 

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=235362 

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/1026966.html 

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/243033-15-atikmdag-problem 

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/253529-15-error-display-driver-atikmdag-stopped-responding-driver 



I've had a 4870 and 4870X2 and this happened with both.
posted by : B, 24 September 2008


Why not blame the real culpret.....

FUGGIN VISTA.....useless shite that it is
When reading this article, the author's positive bias towards nVidia hardware is clearly revealed.
Tell us nQuirer, where art thine objectivity?
Head over to avsforum.com and in the Htpc forum do search fore
Sound~Hdmi~Ati~Yamaha~Onkyo
Have a plesant day
This is only the top of the mountain.

Go to http://forums.amd.com/game/ and type into the search window DVI PROBLEM, there's plenty of users pissed already. Everywhere :guru3d.com , rage3d.com, forums.sapphiretech.com ... and this is not only Ati problem, nvidia cards work better because they doesn't cling to dispaly specification EDID .... This is nightmare
I have a Radeon 3470. I use it mainly for Bluray/DVD video and TV viewing.

It was great at first. It runs cool with passive cooling.

After a few months of use, the video playback shows artifacts on occasion, and then more and more frequently.

I don't see it is a problem with driver or software, as I did not change any of them, almost.

Recently switched to GF9800GT not a single problem so far. 

Just a case for you guys to reference.
It is of course very hard to tell if ATI cards are bad, what with those drivers and their flaky installers and such, you never have a stable software environment to test the hardware in.

(note: I have ATI cards, I speak from experience)
Yeah right Charlie, right...If there are really 15,000 faulty cards in the market, some may say that it isn’t especially nice of Diamond to keep the whole issue quiet. But what else should the company do? Issue a full recall?

Yes, it would have been the honorable thing to do, but this is a business world. A recall would have been a suicide business-decision since replacing 15,000 graphics cards can easily bankrupt a company like Diamond.

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39454/135/


According to our industry source, Diamond Multimedia has been aware of the problem, but decided to keep the “faulty” cards in the channel. We were told that all HD 3850 512 MB cards shipped between January and July are defective as well as a substantial number of HD 3870 512 MB cards and X2 models. All cards lack power management features; the 3850s were identified to have quality issues with poor soldering and integrated memory problems while the 3870s were delivered with a wrong resistor value, which can result in computers not starting up and system crashes.

The whole issue was amplified through a complaint by Alienware, which, according to sources, returned all graphics cards it had purchased from Diamond Multimedia. The system builder found failure rates of more than 10% with X2 cards, more than 2% with 3870 models and almost 8% for 3850 versions. Especially problematic were artifacts in common games as well as system crashes.
For Alienware, the issue was serious enough to scrap its business relationship with Diamond and replace it with another supplier. In total, Alienware returned more than 2600 graphics cards. In a previous instance, Alienware had found 100% of a supply of Diamond Multimedia graphics cards to be defective.
...
ati fails too, i had a card fail a while ago. The fan was bad on it, so i did a rma on the site. 2 weeks latter i had a new one, not the same card. I dont know if it was because i bought it from ATI not a 3rd partie. But i was very satisfied with my ati products. But linux drivers sucked, Then i got dumb and bough a nforce and nvidia chipset. The card already went out, and the chipset has faulty memory controller that wont run my memory at full speed. Plus the active armor that sounded so good n the box didnt work, ever. Things havent changed!
Hi All,

I'm the VAR/SI business manager at Diamond, and I wanted to clear a few things up about this story.

First, I want to point out that this "leak" is coming from a disgruntled ex-employee who was recently fired, and is basically a massive exaggeration of an issue we had with a small batch of 3870s.

The real story is that there was a problem with a small batch of cards manufactured for Alienware caused by a missing resistor. The number of cards was less than 300 units, and we took them all back. Additionally, the chances of anyone having getting one of these cards is *extremely* low. To my knowledge, this flaw prevented the system from even posting, so it was extremely easy for Alienware to catch.

There are *not* tens of thousands of flawed cards in the wild.

We want to be as transparent as possible about all of this, so if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to give us a call.

You can reach me directly at the contact info below, or call our general line at 818-773-9600

Thanks,

Blake Eggleston
VAR/SI business manager
Tel: 818-534-1414 x132
Email: blake@diamondmm.com
This company is already struggling.I dont think they can withstand too many of these kind of failures.