AMD Fusion A8-3850 APU "Llano" On Linux

[crispy]

I just put together an itx 3850 system


I'll report back later with details when I get an OS installed and what not

Yes please! What case are you using? Can you also post some results with undervolting and temperatures?

[Soul_keeper]

case is lian li PC-Q11
I'll post pics later, I'm struggling with the software side of things now

Can't figure out which modules are needed to get the sound to work on this thing ?
anyone know ?
an lsmod output from someone with working sound on a llano system would help

running at 1.2v for now (fluctuates 1.16-1.21 on this asus F1A75-I board ...)
lotsa bios settings to tune in

[Soul_keeper]

Ok, I got everything working

First Small pts run comparing it to a bulldozer and my Q9450 system it'll replace

the system idles around 50W compared to my Q9450 at around 100W idle

I have pictures too
this weblink could change later

[duby229]

Wow, that is an incredibly tight fit. Looks like the PSU barely fit. How do temps on the CPU look with that power supply sitting right on top of it?

[Soul_keeper]

appears idle is about 60c and load is about 70c if the sensors output is to be believed

I just thru in a radeon 6670 making the fit even tighter
I had to do this because the asus motherboard had a dvi-d instead of dvi-i or vga

[schmalzler]

Nice Setup, Soul_keeper!

I also built up a system around the Q11 yesterday. But not with the A8-3850 (but nearly) - finances looked better so I took an i7-2600K+Asrwock Z68. Nice little setup! With a Corsair H60 (Mounted on a 140mm Alpenf?hn EKL Wing Boost as front Fan), CPU temps never go above 50?C in Turbo! The biggest problem were the stiff water tubes from the H60, but with some light pushing all fit perfecty. I did not take photos. If you are interested, I would go and open the case (8 tiny screws - YEAH!).

The A8-3850 I would have cooled with Scythe Shuriken (not Big Shuriken, that one is too big!). You would need to turn the CPU-Fan around, so it pulls away the hot air from the MoBo/cooler, so the direction of the air flow is the same as the one from the PSU-Fan (sitting directly above the cpu-fan). With opposite directions, both fans fight for the air, which would probably lead to heat problems.

ATM installing Gentoo. 7 minutes 48 seconds for compiling glibc - yeah! An Athlon II X3 435@2,9GHZ needs 21m 15s - impressive speed gain. The X3 with WD Caviar Black, the i7 with WD Caviar Blue.

[Soul_keeper]

More benchmarks comparing to my old system and others

Scythe Shuriken 100mm is the hsf I got
the psu is fanless, silences and efficiency were my main goals with this build
I'm not as concerned with high performance (I guess my tastes are changing)
I had to modify the shuriken because the asus board has the cpu socket very close to the pcie slot. I simply bent the heatpipes leading to the upper heatsink moving it up maybe 20+mm

[Soul_keeper]

powernow_k8

now only if I could get the voltage to scale with powernow_k8 and the ondemand governor
voltages aren't shown in dmesg after loading powernow_k8, only the clockspeeds
the clock speeds appear to be changing, but power usage from the wall remains constant ...

any ideas ?

[chithanh]

I think proper power management still depends on having the AMD proprietary driver installed.
If you want, you can dump your DSDT and peek inside after disassembling it with iasl -d. There you can check if the voltages are determined by the BIOS correctly or not.

[Soul_keeper]

Ok, I just did that. I'm not seeing which section would contain the voltages

Package (0x06)
{
0xFFFF,
0xFFFF,
0xFFFF,
0xFFFF,
0xFFFF,
0xFFFF
},

bunch of those, so if that's what I think it is, then it's not being set right ....