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!
You contacted ServerFactory UK and CTT Germany? ASRock Rack Altra boards are coming soon to Newegg after having sold out all of them. They are popular.
You can also get Ampere workstations from MIFCOM in Munich.
https://www.mifcom.de/workstations-ampere-altra-cid774
Hi, thanks for the reply, i tried contacting asrock and asrock eu directly, no response. The combo from Newegg is exactly what i want, but they don’t ship to EU afaik? I tried all the sellers around EU that were listed in asrock rack website, and even contacted a few, no stock 
ServerFactory UK stocks it. I think CTT Germany too. All ASRock Rack resellers and distributors have the ability to order them.
I sent a message to CTT asking if they know when they’ll get stock, their website says “No Stock”, i had to register to see it.
I sent a message to serverfactory now, but they don’t even list the board in their shop.
Thanks regardless!
Alejandro.
Thanks @JoeSpeed for starting this awesome thread! I’m considering jumping into the Ampere Altra world, with the ASRock Rack motherboard.
However, as a FreeBSD user, I found this comment very interesting:
FreeBSD not yet on ASRock Rack because of some ACPI issue.
Could you possibly share more information on the specifics of the challenge with FreeBSD and ACPI with the ASRock Rack motherboard?
And do you know if the FreeBSD community made any progress on this issue since this discussion was started over a year ago?
Thanks!
I wanted to check how *BSD works on Altra.
Turned out that ASrockRack UEFI firmware is incapable of booting from that USB stick (I installed Fedora from USB before).
@hrw I’ve booted from a USB stick many times. Are you sure you’re selecting the correct entry? There are sometimes two: one for the overall USB stick and one for the OS on the stick.
Yeah, that made me suspicious as well. I am back from PTO and will check what is wrong with this USB drive.
Hi all Ampere homelabers,
I upgraded my config with NVMEs, LSI card 9300 8i on a riser and two HDDs.
For LSI card you need to wipe the bios and install only the IT firmware without Efi/lebacy bioses.
And all is all set.
Next episode will be the deployment of an openshift compact cluster.
Also, I moved from Fedora to Centos and I was able to see slightly improvements in performance and stability.
I also moved to EDK2 Bios.
KR,
Bert
I see the problem. You need more drives and GPUs.
And obviously more ram.
