opteron 170, part 2

[Yesterday]{20060802210126}, I wrote about how my Opteron 170 was crashing at random times. Today I have a working system.

Like a good boy, I went out and upgraded the Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 (rev1) BIOS to the latest revision. This was quite the task since I don’t run Windows and Gigabyte is nice enough to provide their BIOS files in self extracting executable archives. The unzip utility that ships with Debian doesn’t work on these anymore – I think it used to sometime ago. Anyway, a few hours later, I had the files on a DOS boot disk.

After the BIOS upgrade the CPU was finally identified correctly on the splash screen as Opteron 170. So I was (prematurely) relieved. I ran memtest and everything checked out. I booted my OS and the system hung after I got into X – just like before.

I was fortunate to have another AMD64 system with a slightly slower CPU acting as my file server. The mother board in this computer was an ASUS A8N5X. Almost the same specs and features as the GA-K8NF-9, but a different manufacturer, different BIOS vendor, different coloured plugs… so naturally it was worth a try.

I swapped everything, rebooted and am running a combination of stress and bzip2 -9 runs. My load is at 40, but the system is surprisingly responsive. I am in X and no crash yet.