"Turn It Off! Turn It Off!"

EIST is what they're calling "let your BIOS manage your voltages for you" these days. The problem with it is that letting the BIOS control the voltage can also lock down your system clock's frequency, which is enough to drive your ntpd process into a persistent psycho-affective disorder.

Imagine putting a chameleon in a terrarium filled with day-glo neon rocks.

Now imagine telling a computer program to carefully watch a constant, and make adjustments to it when it falls outside of your given range.

For the diehards out there, NTP doesn't know how to softly nudge a PPM frequency above 50; mine was locked down at 500. The graphs that it made all yesterday and today are very, very sad.

A direct result of this is that the clock could never skew, it could only do hard adjustments at certain intervals as it raged upward from its specified upper boundaries like an out-of-control freight train.

Fortunately, after much tweaking of BIOS settings, Live Searching, and gnashing of teeth, I finally found the "EIST" setting hidden in my Power Management BIOS page. By disabling this, I'm actually putting control of that value back in the hands of the OS, which is now being monitoring by ntpd. It's already thanked me by divebombing the frequency. Previous range: 0-500.0 PPM. Current range: -0.2810-500.0 PPM. By tomorrow all should be right as rain.