System clock runs too slowly

[tanderson92]

[SOLVED]System clock runs too slowly

I'm on a fresh install of a Mar 2014 Buyer's Guide CustoMac Pro 2011 build:

GA-X79-UP4
32 GB 1600 RAM
GeForce GTX 760
Used this guide.

After sorting out major issues, the system is mostly stable. Mostly. The clock, however, doesn't run properly. I have my MacBook Pro setup next to it, and started both with a fresh timeserver sync. After 20 minutes, the CustoMac is 5 minutes behind time. That's a lot of time to lose in 20 minutes.

On another official Mavericks computer I work on, we are having time issues and decided it might be related to the change to pacemaker. One of the solutions out there is to use an old ntpd. The oldest I have goes back to Oct 2013, so I tried that in /usr/sbin. No help with the clock.

Where do I need to look next? Is this something the bootloader/org.chameleon.boot.plist/smbios can influence? I've found a few old unanswered threads and a 4-yo-one where the user solved the problem but didn't share the solution.

 

[clipper99]

Did you google?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5817181

or

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/53620/daily-clock-drift-of-several-minutes

See if anything there works or sets you in a direction to help.

 

[tanderson92]

I've googled quite a bit, thanks. I'm not precisely asking for ntpd help, although I'd be ecstatic if someone here found that answer. I'm more asking if any of the CustoMac-specific items I mentioned above have the ability to impact the system clock. I'm wondering if I should mess with those things or if this is just a straight-up Mac issue and I should keep scouring the web trying to find a solution.

As it turns out, my ntpd is not writing ntp.drift which is causing pacemaker to choke on "unable to read ntp.drift." I can't figure out why ntp.drift isn't being written as the system is trying to write it. "-f /var/db/ntp.drift" is the last argument of the ntpd command when I issue "ps aux | grep ntpd" but it's still not writing the file.

More googling...

 

[tanderson92]

I'm pretty sure this must be an error in my setup somewhere. The clock takes 13.88 seconds to count up 10 seconds. That's not (I think) a function of ntpd. Forget the fact that ntpd won't write to /var/db/ntp.drift like it's supposed to.

My CPU is a Intel Core i7-4960X. According to Intel its standard clock speed is 3.6GHz. Insanelymac states I should calculate busratio 3600/133 = 27. I've tried busratios all the way to 40 and the clock still counts slowly. Is there something else I can try? Since I'm still having the other BIOS problem where it won't boot P0: unless I manually select it, I was thinking of starting over and seeing if I had better success on round twothree. I'd rather not if I don't have to.

 

[tanderson92]

I'm glad I stopped trying to chase down the clock problem because this isn't the same widely reported Mavericks clock problem. Mine, as I suspected, had to do with the fact that the system thought I had a 4.8GHz processor. Since the processor is really 3.6 normally, it was showing time at a 4.8/3.6 ratio which equals about 14 seconds for every 10 seconds.

After much unsuccessful searching and trying, I used Chameleon Wizard to install a new version of the bootloader. On reboot, my BIOS and clock problems were both solved! I think I'm stable enough to write a guide now. I need to document my process so that I can do it again if needed!