I am a little lost here. I just bought the Asus M3A78-EMH HDMI mainboard with a Phenom 9750 and 4GB of Kingston HyperX KHX8500D2K4/4G memory. Put everything together, installed openSuSE 11.0 x86-64 (2.6.25.9-0.2-default) and after some issues with the madwifi and the ATI drivers everything is working smoothly. The only thing that bothers me: the DRAM frequency is at 800MHz, but the system IS capable of 1066MHz. There is a thread on the Asus site http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?...Language=en-us, this guy has the same problem as I do. I managed to set all the voltage and timings as it should work for the memory sticks.

When I boot with 1066 MHz, the system always crashes. Sometimes it ends with Kernel Panic, or saying something bash is not right or libc or udev having a problem (if anyone can tell me how to get the bootlog of a previous boot I will post it).


The question is: could it be that openSuSE does have a problem when I change the DRAM frequency from 800 to 1066MHz? Do I have to reinstall it with 1066 MHz set from the beginning? Does anyone knows something about this mainboard working with Linux or about issues with the Phenom 9750?

Help is very appreciated!!
Thanks a lot!!!


Edit: for completeness the output of lspci and dmesg:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] RS780 Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 9602
00:11.0 SATA controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 SATA Controller [IDE mode]
00:12.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB OHCI0 Controller
00:12.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB OHCI1 Controller
00:12.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB EHCI Controller
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB OHCI0 Controller
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB OHCI1 Controller
00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB EHCI Controller
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 SMBus Controller (rev 3a)
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 IDE Controller
00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 LPC host controller
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 PCI to PCI Bridge
00:14.5 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB700/SB800 USB OHCI2 Controller
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 10h [Opteron, Athlon64, Sempron] HyperTransport Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 10h [Opteron, Athlon64, Sempron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 10h [Opteron, Athlon64, Sempron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 10h [Opteron, Athlon64, Sempron] Miscellaneous Control
00:18.4 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 10h [Opteron, Athlon64, Sempron] Link Control
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon HD 3200 Graphics
02:06.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5212/AR5213 Multiprotocol MAC/baseband processor (rev 01)

This is a problem that is common with overclockers. You may think that you are not overclocking but the fact that the Asus board's default FSB is 800 means that you are overclocking the motherboard chips. (Northbridge/Southbridge I don't know which). I just had the same problem with an Asus board with a default FSB of 800 MHz. I put in some 1066 MHz memory and adjusted the memory voltage per the manufacturers specs. That computer is running Vista and it would crash from time to time until I cranked up the voltage on the motherboard chips. I believe that I set the chip voltage to 1.7V. That fixed the problem. I just chose 1.7V because it was halfway up the scale of available voltages. You could play with it to determine the lowest voltage that works. Of course you may have to reinstall Linux due to file corruption from all the crashes while you are testing. Or you could use a live Linux CD during testing.

I changed the voltage to 2.2V according to Kingston specs.. Still the same problem. I also set the the timings to 5-5-5-15 which are the default timings for the memory.

I do not understand why openSuSE works with 800MHz but not with 1066MHz set?!

You are missing my point. I said that the motherboard chip voltage ALSO needs to be adjusted upward. This is NOT a problem with OpenSuSE. It is a hardware problem that is easily fixed.

If your hardware isn't working, it is expecting quite a lot for the operating system to work in spite of that.

Rather than booting all the way into the OS to do a check, you might want to try memtest to see if that shows up memory errors.

To be fair the increase in speed by overclocking is not that great, so you might as well accept the lower clock rate. Of course, if you knew that you weren't going to overclock, you could have probably got the same level of system performance for less money, which might be an irritant...

This is exactly what is annoying me.. I bought these RAMs and this mainboard because they are supposed to work at 1066.. Anyway.. I will try the suggestion of stress_junkie and give it a try with a Live-CD.. Thanks for the answers so far!!