Yesterday we reported that Intel’s 2-way workstations intended E7505 core-logic has a couple of AGP related issues and wondered if the same problems can be experienced with the 1-way workstation E7205 chipset (see the news-story here). Today our readers found this SpecUpdate on the E7205 that declares the same shortcomings, as with the elder brethren.

I think that I should again mention the particular issues for those, who have not read the original news-story. During the E7205 simulation studies, it was determined that the AGP signals were not meeting the tVAL(min) of 1 ns. The bug is resolved by board workaround, hence, end-users should not experience any problems with the actual mainboards. Another problem with E7205 MCH concerns AGP prefetch cache. System hangs can occur during AGP transactions when the AGP Prefetcher is enabled. One should disable AGP prefetch cache by clearing bit 0 of AGP Miscellaneous Register (Device 1 Function 0 Offset A0–A3h). Issue can be resolved by BIOS workaround. Just like the updated E7505 MCH, core voltage of the E7205 MCH is 1.3V.

So, if you happen to owe a E7205 or E7505-based mainboard, install the latest version of BIOS in order to solve all the possible problems with AGP that are known so far. Of course, some mainboard manufacturers may install the appropriate BIOS versions by default.