[conspire] New Box

[David Fox]

First, a big thank you to Daniel for technical help and to Kai for
moral support!

Daniel especially. This ECS box has been running smoothly since early
Sunday morning. I had to go to Fry's after all for a sata power cable
and we managed to get the DVD burner (Pioneer) installed and running
as well as my old 40 gig storage drive with the avis and mp3s. Now I
can watch those high-def battlestar galactica episodes in mplayer
without the audio stuttering. Too slow on an athlon thunderbird.

To Daniel since I don't remember your email address off the top of my head:

My /proc/cpuinfo seems a bit low for a 5200 speed processor. I know
that a 5200 isn't really 5200 mhz, that's a marketing gimmick. But
couldn't it be higher, with better bios settings and/or overclocking?
Now I don't want to even try overclocking this cpu until I put in a
better power supply (although the system is stable for now -- I hope).

Given what I have, and the bios settings you did last nightl, is there
"throttling" going on here? I see something in /proc/cpuinfo called
100mhzsteps under "power management"

Here is my /proc/cpuinfo:

dfox at newbox:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 15
model           : 107
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 1000.000
cache size      : 512 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 2
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge
mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext
fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy
svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch
bogomips        : 2011.12
TLB size        : 1024 4K pages
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps

processor       : 1
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 15
model           : 107
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 1000.000
cache size      : 512 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 1
cpu cores       : 2
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge
mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext
fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy
svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch
bogomips        : 2011.12
TLB size        : 1024 4K pages
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps

Another thing. I got nvidia 3d graphics running in Ubuntu Hardy easily
enough. Things in that arena generally work OK, but I'm noticing some
strange video effects when i do 3d stuff - like parts of the screen
going blank when the mouse pointer moves across the screen. i don't
think it's endemic to Hardy and their current nvidia driver because
I've seen the same things happen in Sabayon when I boot 3.5 beta 3 (oh
and Bruce: I got a good clean verified Sabayon 64 DVD now!) so things
like their network manager applet are unusable because i can't see
half of the applet.

I'm going to have to read up on that more over the next few days. I
think the 6100 Geforce that's on the MB should be good enough for now.