[ale] New box (happy birthday to me)

[JK]

I built the 8GB Phenom box I mentioned in the "Virtualization"
thread, and yeah, it seems to handle the guests a lot more
smoothly than did the P4 machine I wrote about earlier :-)

Some flakiness, though, which I've googled about with not much
luck:

* The BIOS says "Installed RAM: 8192MB  Usable: 6911 MB".
Where is 1281MB going?  The Linux kernel also sees only 6911MB.

* Always at boot the Linux kernel says something like: "You
have no RAM aperture, please enable IOMMU in the BIOS". However,
there doesn't seem to be any such BIOS option. (Motherboard is
an ASUS M3N78, BIOS is Phoenix/Award.)

* Often at boot time the Linux kernel says "Unable to enumerate
devices on USB interface 3". When this happens the machine
usually hangs with a black screen :-(  (And no ctl-alt-f1 console
joy, either.) If it gets past this point, though, it boots fine
(into Ubuntu Intrepid AMD64 desktop).

I'm running without any overclocking; all BIOS settings are
"standard" or "safe".

I wonder if I need to RMA this motherboard?

Thanks,

-- JK

-- 
I do not particularly want to go where the money is -
  it usually does not smell nice there. -- A. Stepanov