Nice! And thank you for the blog post!
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Nice build, love the case. Did you have any trouble with the second card? I have the same board and it looks like the CMOS battery is in the way
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The battery may fit into a space space near the card cooler.
My RX6700XT is 3 fans long but the card pcb is much shorter so the battery did not block.
When I put an ancient HD4870 then pcb was just next to the battery.
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Some cards fit, some can be squeezed in there. That CMOS battery is moved and changed to a low profile in the latest units so as to not interfere with PCIe cards.
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Hey all!
I’m Arian. A NixOS maintainer who works mostly on the systemd subsystem. I have to do a lot of rebuilds to test things out with NixOS and was thus looking for a nice aarch64 workstation to help me with this. So far I have been using my MacBook Pro for aarch64-linux builds which served me well but I often have large builds that need to run for a long time and my laptop I also use for work.
I picked the CPU and memory up second hand with very large discount. To a point where I was a bit worried if they would function at all 
The CPU seemed to be unstable when I first tried it out, but after getting some advice from people here and re-reseating the CPU it seems to have been stable for the past 30 hours.
The RAM came with mixed RCDs. (3 M393A4K40EB3-CWECO and 3 M393A4K40EB3-CWECY) So far I haven’t had any stability issues so it seems fine? What are people’s experience with mixing RCD chips? I am planning to scout 2 more RAM sticks on eBay to fill in all the 8 slots.
So far I’ve been using the workstation headless and will probably keep using it like this as I have a Mac Mini for my graphical needs. But maybe I’ll slide in an old graphics card at a later point. I have an AMD Radeon RX580 lying around in storage. I heard AMD graphics cards had some issues with Ampere? This is a very old one though that has always been well-supported on Linux so I wonder if it will run into issues too?
For the case I picked a Fractal North as it’s very classy. Do make sure to readjust the standoff screws though! Also one needs to be removed or it will short the motherboard. But that warning was conveniently in the motherboard manual so happy that that was added 
BOM
| ASRock ALTRAD8UD-1L2T | 1 | €945.84 |
|---|---|---|
| Arctic Freezer 4U-M | 1 | €80.72 |
| Fractal North Chalk White | 1 | €139.90 |
| Seasonic Vertex PX-750 | 1 | €169.60 |
| WD_BLACK SN850X NVMe SSD 2TB | 1 | €135.75 |
| ASRock TPM2-S TPM Module | 1 | €14.77 |
| Samsung M393A4K40EB3-CWE 32GB | 6 | €474.00 |
| Ampere Altra Max M128-30 AC-212825002 | 1 | €477.03 |
| Total | €2,437.61 |
Looking forward being part of the community!
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Age doesn’t matter, the drivers require work to get them to work with the pcie65 bug. I’ve heard Intel Arc cards can work but I recommend NVIDIA for the best compatibility and usability.
Intel Arc requires the same kernel pcie65 workaround patches that AMD does, and a very simple patch to the Xe driver (i915 driver doesn’t work on non-x86.) Nvidia is the only one that doesn’t require a patched kernel.
Im fine with running a patched kernel. I’ll look if I can apply the patch
Hi, trying to get a system here in Europe… the only motherboard i seem to find semi available is the Gigabyte dual socket one, which is a bit too much for my homelab use. The Asrock is just not available anywhere apparently, anyone has any idea when there might be stock again or what the situation is? Should i wait? Are there other options?
Thanks!
I got it here https://smicro.eu/asrock-altrad8ud-1l2t-1
Seems to be in stock?
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Where are you seeing the stock?
It says:
Availability Not in stock
I also talked with a rep on chat last week and they said they didn’t know when it will be back in stock.
My build. With probably the last Asrock motherboard from Anafra stock, ARCTIC Freezer 4U-M Ampere (this was hard to find in stock) and a used Q80-30 and 8x32GB of RAM. Hrw already berated me about the lazy cabling 
This is going to be used mostly for yocto builds. I’m also curious to try CPU-only inference with LLAMA.
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Awesome. Keep us updated on it.
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During time since building Wooster I moved Radeon RX6700XT from my x86-64 box (each time I see kernel version anywhere it reminds me that pcie controller error/patches: 6.15.7-200.fc42.pcie65.4.aarch64).
Then moved 1TB NVME from Puchatek to have an easy way to access my old /home/ partition.
Having AArch64 system as the main desktop shows that we (developers, users, etc.) did a lot since 2014 when I tried using APM Mustang in the same role.
There are still problematic things but, as a whole, it is better than it was in the past.
And I know that AmpereOne would not be the next buy. I want SVE2 in my next system.
Just finished putting together my own system after waiting to get the Asrock motherboard. Been getting used to the BMC and had to pull out an old VGA monitor to access and update the bios. Other than that it has been a wonderful machine to mess with and even got a few games I play to work. Other than the blinking fan LED’s (Which seem to be because the fan speed is about as low as it can be.) It’s been a solid experiance.
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Sub 15L Ampere Altra build (ARM SFF)
I had this wired issue with Gentoo, that building takes too long, and I decided to throw cores and memory at the issue. Finally, a decent amount of cores 
Components:
- SSUPD Meshroom S (14,9L)
- Ampere Altra Q80 30
- Asrock Rack ALTRAD8UD-1L2T
- Samsung 512GB DDR4 3200MHz ECC
- Noctua NH-D9 AMP-4926 4U
- WD Black SN850X 4TB
- Sapphire Radeon RX 9060 XT Pulse 16GB
- Asrock Thunderbolt 4 AIC
- ASUS PCE-AXE59BT (Wi-Fi 6E)
- Corsair SF750
- MODIY ASRock Server MicroFit 4 Pin to Seasonic 10 Pin Adapter Cable
- Noctua NF-A14x25 G2
I got a great deal on the CPU on ebay (430 USD), which kicked off the build. Total cost is ~3.200 EUR (~2.700 EUR net, i.e. ~3.200 USD + tax).
I try to get the GPU running ( AArch64 UEFI driver for AMD GPUs (for graphics output during boot) ) and I try to get Thunderbolt up and running, because I aim for single cable solution. The Asrock Thunderbolt 4 AIC seems to work on unsupported x86 mainboards, so I have some hops to get it running.
Links:
- More on the build: /r/sffpc
- Progress with Gentoo: /r/Gentoo (llvm/musl/libc++)
- Pictures: Meshroom S & Ampere Altra SFF | Flickr
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That looks awesome, thanks for posting. I better get back to work before I look at more computer pictures.
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Decided to make some small upgrades and clean up the cables. (Inside the case.) Swapped my a2000 for a 5060ti and added some more noctua’s including a 40mm fan to the x550 heatsink. Added a manual fan controller for the cpu so I can just set and forget it. All that and a new 990pro SSD to replace that aging 970 evo. I also threw in a USB card to get my cases Type C and two more USB A ports.
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Lovely! It is probably quiet like an owl.