Real-time clock messing up big time

[Michel Rouzic]

Hello all,

I'm having some issues with my PC lately. I have an ASUS A7N8X-E that
I've had for a few years, with an Athlon 2400+ I've had for a few
years as well, and an AGP BFG GeFoce 7800 I've had for a few months. A
couple of days ago, I had two BSoDs a few hours apart (whereas I
haven't had any for months), all related to memory, after which I
tested each of my RAMs with memtest86 to find out that one of the two
reproduced faulty bit patterns. So I took it out and now am running
only on the valid 512 MB one.

However the next day I had another BSoD, this time a 0x50, which
according to my online search might be caused by faulty hardware.

But here is the real reason why I'm posting about my issues here, the
real-time clock is messing up big time, since (I think) somewhere
around the 0x50 BSoD, although it could have been since a bit before
that. I calculated that when I leave my PC on, the clock advances by a
little more than 3 hours a day.

Yup, 3 hours a day, or almost 8 minutes an hour, that's pretty big,
and that definitely isn't right. Something sounds definitely wrong
here, hardware wise, even though I removed the RAM that triggered
memtest86's warnings only after a few seconds of testing (I didn't
full test the second RAM).

Any ideas what's wrong here? Thanks a lot in advance.

 

[Michel Rouzic]

I guess you checked your cmos battery.

I don't think the CMOS battery has any impact on the time when the
computer stays on.

 

[Franc Zabkar]

But here is the real reason why I'm posting about my issues here, the
real-time clock is messing up big time, since (I think) somewhere
around the 0x50 BSoD, although it could have been since a bit before
that. I calculated that when I leave my PC on, the clock advances by a
little more than 3 hours a day.

Your headers say you are posting from the GMT-7 time zone, but your IP
address is in Dublin, which is at GMT, and your email address is
French which is at GMT+1. I suspect your RTC may be as confused as I
am.

Are you running any atomic clock software? Do you gain those 3 hours
all at once or gradually? If you don't reset your clock, will you have
gained 6 hours by the next day?

- Franc Zabkar

 

[Paul]

Hello all,

I'm having some issues with my PC lately. I have an ASUS A7N8X-E that
I've had for a few years, with an Athlon 2400+ I've had for a few
years as well, and an AGP BFG GeFoce 7800 I've had for a few months. A
couple of days ago, I had two BSoDs a few hours apart (whereas I
haven't had any for months), all related to memory, after which I
tested each of my RAMs with memtest86 to find out that one of the two
reproduced faulty bit patterns. So I took it out and now am running
only on the valid 512 MB one.

However the next day I had another BSoD, this time a 0x50, which
according to my online search might be caused by faulty hardware.

But here is the real reason why I'm posting about my issues here, the
real-time clock is messing up big time, since (I think) somewhere
around the 0x50 BSoD, although it could have been since a bit before
that. I calculated that when I leave my PC on, the clock advances by a
little more than 3 hours a day.

Yup, 3 hours a day, or almost 8 minutes an hour, that's pretty big,
and that definitely isn't right. Something sounds definitely wrong
here, hardware wise, even though I removed the RAM that triggered
memtest86's warnings only after a few seconds of testing (I didn't
full test the second RAM).

Any ideas what's wrong here? Thanks a lot in advance.

This is a known issue, but I'm not aware of an official admission
of the problem.

http://nforcershq.com/forum/20-vt19...torder=asc&highlight=nforce2+clock&&start=190

"WOO HOO!
Thanks to this guy who found a German site that shows how to
fix this problem.

I've tested this in three (ASUS, MSI, Chaintech) nForce2
motherboards, and this fixed them all.

Ok... This is what I did to get my clock working.
DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK (as in back up data, etc.)
And I'm not responsible! This worked for me, I don't know if
it will for you. Go to the "device manager" in windows xp, click on
"Computer" there it will say "Uniprocessor PC", right click and
update driver, then update it to "Advanced Configuration and Power
Interface (ACPI) PC". Restart the computer, then go into the BIOS,
then "disable" the APIC function in the BIOS. Boot into windows,
from there it will find your devices again (CD-rom, IDE, etc.)
and your clock should work.

It worked for my brother and I, hopefully it will work for you
people out there, too.

GL,
BioHaz"

That would suggest the problem is related to APIC versus PIC
operation for interrupts. Some other research showed there
seemed to be an interaction with CPU clock rate. If a "canonical"
clock rate was used (133, 166, 200) for input to the CPU,
then the APIC issue might not surface. If some other
clock value was used, some users noticed large timekeeping
changes. That is the only setting I've heard of, that
makes a difference. Presumably this is a bug in the interrupt
handling of the Nforce2 chipset.

Paul

 

[Michel Rouzic]

Your headers say you are posting from the GMT-7 time zone, but your IP
address is in Dublin, which is at GMT, and your email address is
French which is at GMT+1. I suspect your RTC may be as confused as I
am.

Hehe, simple. GMT-7 is because I post from Google Groups which is
based in California. I'm French but I moved to Dublin.

Are you running any atomic clock software? Do you gain those 3 hours
all at once or gradually? If you don't reset your clock, will you have
gained 6 hours by the next day?

Nope, it's more like the length of a minute is changed. However I
rebooted in Ubuntu (I normally run Windows) and this didn't happen at
all. Now I rebooted into Windows and it's only a matter of a few
minutes a day.. so I guess that's not really constant. Someone told me
it could have to do with a faulty hardware driver causing too many
interrupts or something, or/and also that it wasn't my RTC that was
changing but Windows that was running the time with no regard for the
hardware clock.