Most newer motherboards are shipping with frequency control capabilities in the BIOS that allows the system to control the clock rate at a very granular level. Trouble is that not all motherboards do a very good job of talking to the operating system and letting them know that they are adjusting the clockrate. The end result is some major clock drift. On my Foxcon board under Ubuntu for example, I was drifting 4 seconds for every 1 minute that passed. Keeping 56 seconds per minute essentially. Come to find out, my board was set to automatically try to adjust the CPU frequency based on load in the BIOS and was doing a poor job of it. Note that this is not Linux CPU Frequency scaling that Im talking about. Im talking about the board trying to do it on it’s own. So if your new machine can’t keep time, try checking for any kind of clocking options that might be enabled in your BIOS. Saved me 100 bucks and an RMA.
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