[mdlug] 2 very different gigabyte motherboards not keeping good time

[Dan Pritts]

Hi all -

For several years I’ve run an old 1.9GHz 64-bit athlon, with a gigabyte motherboard.  It never kept good time, whether running under freeBSD (8.x then 9.x) or linux (centos6).  NTP couldn’t keep it synced, I gave up and put in a 5-minute cron job with an ntpdate.  I updated to whatever BIOS they maxed out with but no help.

I recently upgraded the system to a “pentium” haswell chip.  I love how they use the pentium name still, what, 15 years later?  Anyway, once again, based on reputation and the fact that the other motherboard never puked, I bought a gigabyte motherboard.  When I installed the system, I updated the BIOS.

Guess what, it doesn’t keep time, and NTP can’t keep up.

I do not have the system on a UPS or anything else that might muck with the power frequency coming in.  Just plugged in to the wall, DTE power in the middle of ann arbor.

I did use the same power supply.  I can’t remember the brand, but it is a good quality 80+ unit, not the cheapest piece of junk I could find.

Any thoughts on what could be causing this?  I’m left with two thoughts, PSU or just crappy gigabyte timekeeping.  PSU seems unlikely - the system has otherwise been very stable.  bad gigabyte time also seems unlikely, but what do i know. 

thanks
danno