Newegg offers ASRock Rack Ampere bundle with mobo + 64 core Altra + heat sink in North America. Who might be good retailers to carry the bundle in EU, UK and other markets? btw, if you want one then place your order. Newegg has already been shipping bundles as they arrive from ASRock Rack.
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Well done, beautiful build!
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I saw your review on Newegg! Nice looking build. That pushed me to take the plunge! (Please forgive the cobbled cooler setup)
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Yes! I canāt wait for the 92mm one to be available.
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There was a moment today when I started wondering who to ask to bring ASRock Rack ALTRAD8UD from USA to Madrid (Linaro Connect in May).
But then thought that in case something goes wrong, sending board to USA would cost ā¬ā¬ā¬.
2024: the year of x86-64 desktop. Again.
Newegg ship to the UK, but unfortunately not to the EU. And Newegg appears to be the only shop selling this bundle. Amazon US do sell this board, but thatās kind of useless when there is nowhere to buy an Ampere Altra separately.
They do come with a suggestion, though:
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And while we are still waiting for availability of the current model, a new model has already been announced: the ALTRAD8UD2-1L2Q
The Intel X550 10GBase-T RJ45 dual NIC, has been replaced with a Broadcom 25 GB SFP dual nic. Thatās great, I hate 10GBase-T over RJ45 cables. So unreliable, so much heat and power consumption.
Thereās one less M.2 connector, but that should not matter with so many SlimSAS and Oculink ports.
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Iāve now stuffed mine into an old 5,1 mac pro. The mac pro apple doesnāt seem to want to make.
At least it kind of looks the part. All the fan headers are nice to have on this board.
I was trying to get ahold of a newer 2019 mac pro case, but they um, donāt seem to die very often, so broken chassis are not easy to find.
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Beautiful 
I donāt know why I havenāt thought of that ā building it inside an old Mac Pro shell could make for a very quiet build, though the PCIe slots are probably the most annoying aspect to deal with. Looks like you were able to make it work!
Itād be cool if thereās a way to interface with the HDD cages and you could put some storage in there too!
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The PCIe slot alignment made for some difficulty. Using the original alignment pushes the board up over some of the case metal overlap and there is nothing to fasten it down to. The board sits on an acrylic backing that attaches to the original left side and top fastening posts. Its rigid enough to keep the board stable. I had to cut out a lot of the original cpu tunnel shroud to keep it looking ok, the rear 120mm is being held in only by itās original clip point. Yes, the cpu fans are being supported by a dreamcast memory unit. It looks poor, works until noctua sells the 92mm fansink.
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We are building out an Asrock Rack Ampere system, and are having some trouble with it. It takes ~4mins to get any sign of life on VGA. Has anyone else seen this?
Also, the BIOS is reset each reboot. We are trying to disable various options, but they donāt āstickā.
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It does take a looooong time to boot on this board. Power-on to vga life is about 1 minute 46 seconds. Then it takes some more time to boot to the os or to get into the bios setup. It runs well once itās up. My bios settings do seem to hold though. I save and exit setup, and they stay. It sounds dumb, but check the cmos battery voltage, they might have sent it with a bad one. Iāve had some dell pcās like that. Otherwise Iām not sure why it resets. I have the jumper set on my motherboard to disable the BMC, that may be shortening my boot time, but Iām not sure itās even doing anything, the bmc is still running.
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If you donāt need networking during boot, disabling the network stack should speed things up quite a bit.
Also, Iād suggest making sure you have the latest BMC and BIOS/UEFI firmware installed from https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=ALTRAD8UD-1L2T#Download since there have been quite a few fixes and improvements.
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Would you recommend latest stable, or the beta release?
Thatās a bit tricky because I assume thereās a reason itās beta and not a production release!
But Iād recommend the beta releases of the BMC and UEFI/BIOS because they have quite a few nice fixes and improvements.
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By the way, the bundle is in stock again.
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