Brief Hands-On Report--May 2005 ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition ROM Update

In April, ATI released ROM Update v107 for their new Radeon X800 XT graphics card and ATI Displays v4.5 software preference pane. We installed both, the firmware v107 in our newly received Radeon X800 XT graphics card and ATI Displays 4.5. On reboot we got a kernel panic right after the gray screen. On subsequent reboots we always got either the same kernel panic or a freeze at various stages of building the desktop. Others had the same problem so we posted a warning on April 25.

ATI subsequently released the April ROM updater again but with the ability to downgrade back to v104 and posted an update to ATI Displays v4.5.1. Installing these fixed our startup problems but left us without the functionality of the then new ROM 107, i.e. fan control in ROM rather than in the Mac OS X extension ROM Xtender.

ATI just released the May 2005 ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition ROM Update v108. The release notes state that the only difference with v107 released in April is that the kernel panic at startup is fixed for those of us who experienced it--not everybody did.

We downloaded v108 which has to be installed in Safe Boot mode (hold down the "shift" key during startup) with Mac OS X 10.4. For some reason, we are unable to startup our dual Power Mac G5 in Safe Boot mode running Mac OS X 10.4. But we were able to do so using our second (backup) drive running Mac OS X 10.3.9. We installed v108 in Safe Boot mode running 10.3.9 even though ATI states that is not necessary for Mac OS X versions earlier than 10.4.

The ROM update to v108 went fine. But the restart into Mac OS X 10.4 was very slow. It took three restarts before our startup regained its usual 30+ second speed.

We started up a number of times and ran a number of applications, including the demanding 3D games Call of Duty and Halo, without any problems. We believe that ATI has done a good job in finding and fixing the bug in the April ROM update v107 and recommed updating with the May ROM updater v108. [Bill Fox]