system freezes

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 09 Nov 2017 08:29:20 +0100, Xen wrote:
>This is an Asus M2N motherboard, M2N-E, it's a horror.

My experiences were clearing CMOS solved issues (usually with replacing
the battery, too) was with my previous mobo an ASUS M2A-VM HDMI without
the HDMI thingy mounted. The BIOS technology is called "ASUS EZ Flash
2"/"ASUS CrashFree BIOS 3", IOW the same as provided by your mobo, let
alone that my old mobo also was for DDR2 RAM, provided SATA 3Gb/s, USB2
and the socket was AM2.

I can't comment on the timer issue, since my AMD CPU used with the ASAU
mobo didn't provide TSC, it only had HPET (HRTIMER).

The wiki claims...

"AMD processors up to the K8 core always incremented the time-stamp
counter every clock cycle.[6] Thus, power management features were able
to change the number of increments per second, and the values could get
out of sync between different cores or processors in the same system.
For Windows, AMD provides a utility[7] to periodically synchronize the
counters on multiple core CPUs. Since the family 10h
(Barcelona/Phenom), AMD chips feature a constant TSC, which can be
driven either by the HyperTransport speed or the highest P state. A
CPUID bit (Fn8000_0007:EDX_8) advertises this." -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Stamp_Counter

...and it provides a link: https://lkml.org/lkml/2005/11/4/173