[SOLVED] Ampere Altra Q64-22 + AsRock Rack ALTRAD8UD (working great!)

[Civiloid]

150W idle is rough.

I recently got myself that motherboard (with Q64-22) and I'm not sure what the difference is (mine had Firmware 2.04 out of box and I've installed 2.05 beta later on) but in my case out of socket, I had power consumption of about 60W for a system with NVMe SSD installed and 8 RDIMMs (2933 Mhz though), and about 90W under full load on CPU and RAM (HPLinpack). I don't have a proper server setup yet, I just had one 140mm Noctua fan plugged as otherwise under load it overheats.

On Intel, the Aspeed 2500 has IPMI accessible fan/temperature curve control.

I think it is not implemented yet in ASrock's IPMI. They've decided to go for OpenBMC out of box and I'm not sure it is well tuned yet, even with 02.06.00 BMC firmware.

Single and multi-thread performance is probably interesting to put the CPU in the spectrum between a recent Pi and an Apple M1/M2.

I've ran Geekbench 5 and 6 there:
Geekbench 6: ALTRAD8UD-1L2T - Geekbench
Geekbench 5: ALTRAD8UD-1L2T - Geekbench

 

[bexcran]

If you want to change the fan/temperature curve for the fans, you can do so manually by editing /usr/share/swampd/config.json - ssh into the OpenBMC Linux distro that's running on the ARM11 BMC CPU with the same username/password you use to login to the web interface.

 

[Hydraulix989]

I ended up switching my cooler from the 2U passive cooler to the Dynatron W1 active cooler, and it works great! Temperatures dropped ~20 C. I'm also seeing about 100W power consumption at idle. @bexcran do you have any ideas on how to reduce this, if possible?

 

[Civiloid]

I'm also seeing about 100W power consumption at idle.

And what is your config, to be precise?

In my little experience with the board, it has a relatively high ~50W idle power consumption baseline when paired with Q64-22. Probably, if you have the M128-26 variant, it would be higher (Altra doesn't drop frequency in Idle, and the overall amount of power-saving features it has seems to be not on par with other CPUs. Also, they think it is a feature). If you add RAM - power consumption will go up with every stick inserted; some RAM consumes more than others, etc.

The same is true for each extra PCIe device you use—basically, they raise idle power consumption, and not all devices would work with ASPM (neither out of the box nor at all, e.x. to make modern GPU stable I needed to disable ASPM completely, and that added quiet a lot to idle power consumption for me).