pontus.ullgren.com

As a Xmas-gift to myself I decided to replace my 10 year old workstation with a new one. After recommendations from a friend I decided to buy the new computer from Mr. PC Computers. I also enjoy supporting local dealers. The very next day I could collect the computer and once at home I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat).

Hardware specs and BIOS settings

Processor

Intel Core i7 950 3066MHz Socket 1366 Box

Motherboard

Asrock X58 Extreme, Intel X58 Chipset LGA1336

Memory

6GB DDR3 1333MHZ (2GBx3)

Graphics

Nvidia Geforce GTX580 1500MB GDDR5 PCIe

Hard drive

500GB 16MB cache SATA2

Optical drive

22x Dual Layer DVD+/-RW

Chassi

Ace ATX GAME EDGE 990

Power supply

FH-Power 800Watt, 120mm fan, Silent PSU

Sound card

Integrated, Realtek HD audio 7.1

Network card

Integrated, Realtek RTL8111DL, 10/100/1000Mbit

In the BIOS I selected the predefined BIOS settings for performance and setting the SATA to AHCI.

All basic functions worked perfectly out of the box and where I found things not working I had great help from Nei's ASRook X58 Extreme3 and Linux post on AntiNetwork.

Here are some more details on how I implemented the tips he gives on Ubuntu 10.10.

Auto unload xhci_hcd (USB3) on hibernate

Since the xhci_hcd module makes hibernation impossible it need to be unloaded prior to hibernation. This can be done using the

Create new file /etc/pm/sleep.d/01_unload_xhci_hcd.

Fixing slow system clock

Just as Nei notes the system clock is lagging allot. Using hpet as the clock source fixes this.

Edit /etc/default/grub.
Change
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
to read
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="clocksource=hpet quiet splash"

The run sudo update-grub

DVD read errors

I now seen read error on all DVDs I try to rip backup and I've not been able to verify if this is a problem with the chipset or DVD reader.
Oddly enough playing DVDs using the VLC works fine but when trying to convert/save them to file I get allot of read error until the process simply halts.