[Discuss] AMD FX-8120 update

[markw at mohawksoft.com]

Well, it has been an ordeal...

I send several hours trying to figure out why my 16 GIG of RAM looked like
8G. I kept trying to find out which RAM dimm was bad, but, in fact, it was
the motherboard.

I had bought a GIGABYTE 990FXA-U3 motherboard. It was out of the box
defective. I didn't know that, of course, I had to swap memory and test
before I concluded it was not, in fact, the RAM but the motherboard.

I had to wait for Sunday to go to Microcenter and get a replacement
motherboard.

It is now working, and here is the output of /proc/cpuinfo:
processor	: 0
vendor_id	: AuthenticAMD
cpu family	: 21
model		: 1
model name	: AMD FX(tm)-8120 Eight-Core Processor
stepping	: 2
microcode	: 0x6000613
cpu MHz		: 3120.331
cache size	: 2048 KB
physical id	: 0
siblings	: 8
core id		: 0
cpu cores	: 4
apicid		: 0
initial apicid	: 0
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid level	: 13
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat
pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht sy
scall nx mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc rep_good nopl
nonstop_tsc extd_apicid aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq mo
nitor ssse3 cx16 sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt aes xsave avx lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm
extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnow
prefetch osvw ibs xop skinit wdt lwp fma4 nodeid_msr topoext perfctr_core
arat cpb npt lbrv svm_lock nrip_save tsc_scale
vmcb_clean flushbyasid decodeassists pausefilter pfthreshold
bogomips	: 6240.66
TLB size	: 1536 4K pages
clflush size	: 64
cache_alignment	: 64
address sizes	: 48 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts ttp tm 100mhzsteps hwpstate [9]

I'm not feeling the love from Ubuntu 12.04. Anyone have a good distro that
uses gnome 2 and the 3.x linux kernel?