http://computershopper.com/shoptalk...hip-with-defect


Some AMD ATI Radeon HD 4830-Based Graphics Cards Ship With Defect

You'd think that in light of the recent fiasco Nvidia endured with a large swath of one of its GPU families being found defective and related products recalled by their respective manufacturers, that AMD might learn a valuable lesson from Nvidia's mistakes and not venture where Nvidia had just tread. But, as they say, history is apt to repeat itself.

No sooner had AMD sent graphics card reference designs using its new ATI Radeon HD 4830 GPU to review sites, that something was not quite right with some of the cards started bubbling up to the blogosphere surface. When the folks over at bit-tech.net tested their Radeon HD 4830 card they were getting lower-than-expected benchmark scores that didn't make sense--especially when compared against the Radeon HD 4850. They also saw similarly bizarre performance results from an HIS-supplied graphics card also using a Radeon HD 4830 GPU. They weren't the only ones to see this issue...

When the techPowerUp tester got his hands on the ATI Radeon HD 4830 reference card he was gathering technical specifications of the card using the GPU-Z utility when he noticed that the utility was seeing only 560 stream processors. The Radeon HD 4830 is supposed to have 640 stream processors--80 stream processors were missing. This means that Radeon HD 4830 cards with 560 stream processors could potentially perform as much as 10 percent slower than cards with 640 stream processors.

It turns out that AMD mistakenly sent out reference-design cards to the media with the wrong BIOS installed. In addition to this being egg on AMD's face, a number of the Radeon HD 4830 product reviews that have been posted show performance based on the presumably wrong, under-performing BIOS. Making matters worse, AMD reports that a small number of Radeon HD 4830 boards from HIS with this same wrong BIOS version are actually in the channel now, where consumers could potentially buy them. The issue is fixable with a BIOS update, but the question is, will everyone who purchases one of the impacted products learn that they need to manually update the card's BIOS, and will they even want to go through the hassle?

Here is ATI's official response to bit-tech.net on the issue:

"AMD has identified that, in addition to reference samples of the ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards sent to media with a pre-production BIOS potentially impacting the card’s performance, a very limited number of ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards were released to market with the same pre-production BIOS. This is in no way hardware related, and an updated BIOS fully resolves the performance limitation.

Through consultations with AMD board partners, it has been determined with a high degree of certainty that fewer than 400 ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards from one AMD board partner, HIS, have reached the market with the pre-production BIOS incorrectly provided by AMD. As only a small number of HIS-branded ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 cards are impacted, we ask any customers that purchased an HIS-branded ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 to test the board using the GPU-Z utility (available at http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz). If the GPU-Z utility reports fewer than 640 shaders, please visit the HIS website for information on how to update the card BIOS via a downloadable install utility."

大義：
有部份的 4830 的顯卡，大約 10% SP 無作用，ATi 官方回應是因為 BIOS 的問題，更新 BIOS 就沒事了，而且僅有少部份的 4830 顯卡有問題。

這些回應怎麼似曾相似.....