Faulty HD 2000-series cards... or not?

Recently at an event in Taiwan promoting AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2000-series graphics cards, someone at AMD hinted that some cards in the channel may be defective. However, given a week for the dust to settle it seems these cards have magically disappeared and everyone is denying knowledge of ever having a problem.

In fact, none of the three Tier One manufacturers, Asustek, MSI and Gigabyte have yet to come across the improper BIOS flash defect.

DailyTech had a word with an engineer at Asus, who citied a specific requirement of Acer for non-UVD (Unified Video Decoder) HD 2600/2400 chips from ATI.

However a specific order for a special part didn't mistakenly get sent to the channel and was used by Acer in OEM parts specifically. Acer also only contracts ECS and Asus for manufacturing, which leaves Gigabyte and MSI a little dumbfounded as they have nothing to do with this UVD-less shenanigans.

Finally, another AMD engineer has claimed "Any report claiming that defective HD 2600 and 2400 [cards] are recalled in the channel is completely untrue." All this makes us wonder who DigiTimes spoke to from AMD in the first place? Perhaps the "AMD organised event" was a bit heavy on the alcohol...?

So wires crossed or a huge-conspiracy cover up? As much as we were fans of the X-Files, it's overwhelmingly likely to be just the former. Let us know your thoughts in the forums.