A few of the cards on sale have only 560 stream processors enabled, rather than the full 640. AMD say that they were part of a limited number of pre-production demo cards with a dodgy pre-production BIOS, designed solely to impress the media, that somehow were released to retailers due to a mix-up somewhere along the line. All these affected cards were made by HiS, and AMD claims that less than 400 of the dodgy cards were released to the retail market.

The HiS cards are quite a bargain at only £89.98UKP inc VAT from MicroDirect. In the unlikely event that you should happen to get a problem card then a BIOS update will fix the issue: All you need to do is to run GPU-Z. If the number in the shaders box is less than 640, then download a BIOS update from this page. (I suggest that you ignore the adverts for spyware-laden Zwinkys etc from Tribalfusion that are scattered around the page.)

Can this mistake be put down to experience and forgotten; or should those people who bought a dodgy card that needs a BIOS fix be compensated? What’s your opinion?