Has anyone successfully picked up a PCI → NVME card that works? The cheap one I picked up from amazon didn’t work out-of-the-box in Debian. Looking to expand to more NVME than just the 2 onboard the ASRock board.
I bought three M.2 NVMe to U2 from China to test on my PC; one works, one only works at x2 speed, and one doesn’t work. Results is the same when I install them into a DL380 Gen10 server.
Maybe the problem comes from PCB quality.
If want to use U2 devices, it can use Ocu2 to U.2 cable,it can get x4 link on my side.
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Yes, you also have four SlimSAS PCIe x8 to connect 8 U.2 at x4.
I’m very late to the party, but I’ve been eyeing an Ampere Altra home build for a very long time and finally free’d up some rack space for a 2U build, in the AIC RMC-2E Chassis.
It’s running the ALTRAD8UD-1L2T + Q64-22 bundle, 256GBs of RAM, and a blower-style RTX 3090.
It idles at roughly 120W, which was a lot higher than I originally thought. Seems like the culprit is the 32GBx8 RAM sticks, where each stick draws almost as much power as the CPU when idle 
Setting up GPU drivers and CUDA was extremely simple - I strongly recommend installing CUDA and drivers through apt as per Nvidia’s instructions:
It’s a fully headless server and the GPU is used for hardware accelerating my ML usecases with CUDA, so I can’t really comment on graphics performance.
The major difficulty was thermals and noise which may have been problems just unique to my specific component choices and circumstances.
I documented most of my journey on my blog, feel free to check it out!
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Hi All,
Let me present my homelab. Asrock Rack Ampere Altra Bundle ALTRAD8UD-1L2T
I addedd 8x64Gb of RAM and 2 Nvidia RTX A5000.
Setup was a bit more difficult mostly due to the time to boot, the need of a VGA cord/screen and some other server-grade details. Thanks to @nmasse-itix for his support !
Now I will dig into all the settings and monitoring of this build.
Best regards,
Bert
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Congrats for the build ! Nice compute power monster ! 
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What a cute litlle monster. 
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This thread was one of helpful ones when I started looking for components for my build of Ampere Altra box.
Some things to copy, some to avoid - as usual.
My setup:
- AsrockRack ALTRA8BUD-1L2T as usual
- used Q80-30
- used 8x16GB ram (SK-Hynix HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN)
- Endorfy 700 Air case (EATX ready)
- Arctic 4U-M cooler
- Lexar LM790 nvme
- MSI MPG A850G psu as it allows for even 3 ESP12V connectors (I use 2)
- Radeon WX2100 to have some graphics (better than AST)
Internals:
Cable organization needs to be done properly - hidden as much as possible:
Standing under desk:
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Bu I already installed nvlink! Look just above !
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from looking at your build, I’d strongly suggest getting one of these active CPU coolers that I helped develop:
- ARCTIC 4U-M Ampere cooler + mounting kit sold separately used by @hrw, System76 Thelio Astra, and many others
- Noctua used by @geerlingguy home NAS, and MIFCOM Ampere workstations
- Dynatron used by Alafia.AI, Crystal Group, NextComputing, and others
Newegg and Amazon carry all of those
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Nice! Did you ever get the Radeon working to 100%?
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Wx2100 is old enough to not cause issues.
I used it with Honeycomb in the past.
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And here is a link to my blog post about it: Bought myself an Ampere Altra system – Marcin Juszkiewicz
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Yes, at the very begining in my atic I got temperature alerts. But as soon as I installed a PWM blower from a cisco router all the temperature issues dissapeared.
It will be part of the final optimization. At the moment I work on storage.
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Would expect that card to still have problems with the Ampere Altra PCIe controller bug regarding write combining and unaligned accesses (aka pcie65 bug) as detailed in other threads of the forum.