As always, the most advanced technologies are not very hard to implement, but very hard to make them actually work. We witnessed the thing with DDR400 support in certain chipsets from VIA Technologies, which was very unstable and slow until it is turned on, now we see the same with ATI Technologies’ RADEON 9700 graphics processor: just turn AGP 8x off and everything is up and running in certain cases.

As discovered by those, who have already purchased the latest graphics card from ATI, the RADEON 9700 PRO, GPUs in early revision AE2 do not work in AGP 8x mode on mainboards based on SiS 648, VIA KT400 and P4X400 chipsets. Apparently, the system even cannot boot up. Meanwhile, everything is just fine on i845/i850, KT333 and other platforms that do not support AGP 8x. Graphics cards powered by the AE3 revision of the graphics chip also work stable and without any bugs like described above.

Currently ATI is investigating the reason of the problem, we cannot exclude that the mentioned core-logic devices work absolutely properly in all revisions, configurations or modes, and all, who happen to run into the problem are strongly advised to visit this page at ATI’s web-site.

At the moment the only solution to avoid the bug is to force AGP 2x or 4x mode in the BIOS of a mainboard.