My new Intel Sandybridge with ASUS P8P67

[klotz]

You might have heared but your chipset has a known hardware design problem. S.o. said above there were problems with some SATA-ports. This might be related:
http://www.intel.com/consumer/produc...et+gg_headline

Thanks @jannis, yes in fact I never got the 3GB/s on-board port to work reliably in the first place. It may be unrelated, but I found that if I plugged in two SATA drives to it, it would randomly pick one to show as the boot drive, and so fail to boot 50% of the time. The other could be found in the "additional boot" menu in BIOS but not in the "select a boot device" (i.e. sticky) list. I moved to the Marvell ports because the driver there is checked first anyway and it avoids the annoying "no drive detected" message. Looks like I fortuitously avoided the problem, though I do need to check and see if the DVD is on the onboard 3GB port (probably is).

[nukem]

Sorry it took so long to reply school is killing me.

Anyway I know about the recall. I never saw any problems using the SATA 3.0G ports but I switched to the SATA 6.0G just incase. As for the problem I am having with Bluetooth. When ever I load the ath3k module I get the following

Bluetooth: Atheros AR30xx firmware driver ver 1.0
ath3k_load_firmware: Can't change to loading configuration err
ath3k: probe of 2-1.7:1.0 failed with error -5
usbcore: registered new interface driver ath3k

I have the firmware installed it just doesn't want to use it.

[klotz]

Sorry it took so long to reply school is killing me.

Anyway I know about the recall. I never saw any problems using the SATA 3.0G ports but I switched to the SATA 6.0G just incase. As for the problem I am having with Bluetooth. When ever I load the ath3k module I get the following

Bluetooth: Atheros AR30xx firmware driver ver 1.0
ath3k_load_firmware: Can't change to loading configuration err
ath3k: probe of 2-1.7:1.0 failed with error -5
usbcore: registered new interface driver ath3k

I have the firmware installed it just doesn't want to use it.

Thanks, @nukem.

I have got my EMU-0202 working again on this configuration.
The problem was unrelated; when I removed pulseaudio (which was presumably opening the device as well) it works fine. Plugging into the 2.0 jacks works now that I remove pulse

It still doesn't work in the USB 3.0 busses. I see now that this is due to kernel bugs in 2.0 devices on USB 3.0, so it's an unrelated problem.

So, no problems specific to the ASUS p8P67 other than problems with USB 3.0 support for USB 2.0 devices.

[klotz]

Limiting CPU speeds

...One thing to watch out for with this setup (I have the P8P67 as well): after I updated to the latest bios, the kernel thought that because it had the ability to fully overclock the processor to the limit, that it should. With the ondemand governor running, I was seeing my processor speed being bumped up to around 5500mhz (with the voltage automatically scaling as well). Setting each core separately in the bios fixed this for me, as the OS doesn't have control of the max speed with that setting.

In any case, it been has been completely stable no matter what crazy thing was going on, and for now I'm quite happy at 4500mhz with everything else at it's default setting in the bios. Speed and voltage scale down automatically to 1600mhz, something I haven't been able to do with any stability when overclocking other CPUs.

@derekjw I am currently trying a new approach: I leave the OC settings as is (per-core) but put this into /etc/rc.local:

# bios is too permissive
cpufreq-set --cpu 0 --max 4.70GHz
cpufreq-set --cpu 1 --max 4.70GHz
cpufreq-set --cpu 2 --max 4.70GHz
cpufreq-set --cpu 3 --max 4.70GHz
cpufreq-set --cpu 4 --max 4.70GHz
cpufreq-set --cpu 5 --max 4.70GHz
cpufreq-set --cpu 6 --max 4.70GHz
cpufreq-set --cpu 7 --max 4.70GHz

It may be possible to do this in some other way, or perhaps earlier than /etc/rc.local (to prevent hyperactive CPU speeds during boot).

Before I did this, I found that it would OC to 4.7 GHz but would occasionally set itself to 5.9 GHz, as you found. After I did this, I don't see the 5.9GHz number occur any more. It does still show up as a clock frequency that's available, and you can select it using the CPU frequency scaling monitor but I'm not sure whether those two situations actually do it or not.

...Would be nice to be able to read processor voltage though, I had to dual boot into Windows to verify it was okay.

With the modules you suggested I am able to use the Ubuntu/Gnome applet and click through to enable display of VCore you you might want to try that. I've set it to graph VCore and the 4 processor temps. (Some other temps are nonsensical and vary randomly when I add and remove them from the list.)

I'm still seeing high temps (getting up to 90 degrees) when I run 8 copies of burnP6, but VCore does stabilize. So this probably indicates a TIM or cooler (both stock) problem rather than a software problem.

Leigh.