Nanite

• Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P motherboard
• AMD FX-8320E 8-core CPU with Scythe Katana cooler
• Corsair Vengeance Dual C DDR3 16GB Kit, 1866MHz CL10
• WD Blue 3.5'' SATA 3 TB 64 MB cache HD
• Asus ROG Strix GTX 1070 OC 8GB Gaming
• Seasonic X-fanless 460 W PSU

Intro

[2019-03-16] New motherboard as the old one was unstable at high CPU loads.

Linux drivers

CPU temperature monitor	k10temp	lm_sensors
CPU power monitor	fam15h_power	lm_sensors
CPU frequency scaling	acpi_cpufreq
Ethernet	r8169
Graphics	fglrx
Sound	Intel HDA, Realtek ALC892

CPU notes

Undervolting

TurionPowerControl works great.

Microcode update

See Hoo.

Frequency scaling

[2018-04-14] With the Katana cooler, I keep the CPU frequencies maxed, using ACPI-cpufreq drivers and the performance governor. With all cores loaded, the max frequency is 3.2 GHz as it should. However, despite the fixed setting, it sometimes dips down to the minimum of 1.4 GHz upon load changes. Perhaps some internal themal throtting is at play; temperatures usually stay around 60 C (crit = +70.0°C, hyst = +67.0°C) but they may peak a bit too much, also depending on GPU heat.

The Turbo 1 mode also works, giving 3.5 GHz at 2..3 loaded cores, but it also gets noticeably hotter than with non-turbo full load. This might explain the thermal throttling issues :-/ Also, as the turbo modes are not visible via the usual cpufreq channels, I haven't been able to set undervolting for them. For now, I've disabled the turbo modes in BIOS.

[2018-05-18] Turbo mode can also be disabled on the fly, with

echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/boost

and likewise enabled back with 1. Linux doesn't seem to have more detailed control over the frequencies, and the Turbo speeds vary between about 3.35 GHz for all cores to 3.5 for fewer loaded ones. These all appear as the highest 3.2 GHz to ACPI-cpufreq and TurionPowerControl, so there is no way to set specific voltages for them.

Ethernet firmware patch

Similarly to Hoo.

Open source and OpenCL on Radeon

As in old Hoo...

Nvidia

..but now using nvidia-drivers which are quite seamless to install and use. For details on video decoding, see Hoo.

WD idle3 issue

As seen before, the WD hard drive has the idiotic 8-sec spindown by default. See old nanite page for more; I used idle3-tools to disable it, as regular spindown timer is enough.

---

Risto A. Paju