Radeon 9800 Pro screwed up by format
 

I formatted my computer yesterday to fix a partition problem, and -lo and behold - my video card decides that running at AGP 8x will cause system instability.

Reinstalling drivers, installing new drivers, using Windows Update, and fiddling around with various settings (even the motherboard BIOS - which I can't update due to a lack of a floppy drive. No, seriously, no floppy drive.) Anyways, AGP 8x AND fast write worked before the format.

Any ideas?

that sounds weird. I dont have floppy in any of my comps and i can update. Sounds like you guy serious issues. I would try formating again cuz it sounds like sumtin went totaly haywire since everthing seems to not work :-) but i dont know that much about this kind of a issue. Im just saying what i would do

No, everything but AGP 8X and fast write work.

It seems to run Half Life 2 the same as before the format..

There is something about Ati drivers that cause this to happen. Me and my friend have both experienced this problem (with 9800pro's) of not being able to run AGP 8x or fast write, and it usually happens after some kind of format or flash of the mobo bios. I am fairly certain it is the ATI drivers becuase I have an Intel based system and my friend has an AMD system with completely different parts except the 9800pro's.

To be honest I have no idea how I fixed it. I think I tried a veriety of driver packs from Ati and that didn't work apparently and I gave up. However after one of the reboots it randomly went back to 8x. This has happened to me at least 2 times and it eventually rights itself.

It should be noted that AGP8X isn't really a necessary performance boost, especially with 128 and 256MB cards. The only data that has to traverse the AGP bus is the textures when they're first loaded, and then a steady stream of instructions. When AGP8x came out, most hardware reviewers concluded that the extra bandwidth created only marginal improvements in framerates. This is the same thing that happened with ATA133; most drive manufacturers never picked it up since ATA100 drives worked just as fast as ATA133 ones.

Unless you're getting noticeable performance degradation, I wouldn't fret about it.