SOLVED: CW56-58 initial deployment woes (Ryzen 7 5825U / 4x i226v)

[alaricljs]

I bought the unit from CWWK via Amazon for the cheapest price I'd seen - $338 and I've had it in hand for a few days. I ran through the (confusing) BIOS settings and settled on what I thought were reasonable settings. Had to turn on SR-IOV, set the 3 different power recovery options to the same value, change IOMMU and DMAr from auto to enabled so I know they'll definitely be on...

I then installed Proxmox PVE 8.0.2 on SATA zfs mirrors (MX500 256GB) and validated a network port. I added in an m.2 SSD on the H-board adapter to validate the x4 connectivity (it's there!). Next step was memtest86 and that went smoothly.

Through all this I found that things were resetting the BIOS to defaults ettings that I wouldn't have expected. Add the m.2 - reset, remove it - reset, At one point it reset from just removing a USB flash drive, tho I doubt that's really what did it. Download links for the BIOS didn't work so I contacted CWWK, 3rd method's the charm - cwwk.net chat. They provided a link to a different site to get the BIOS.

The new BIOS installed clean and doesn't look any different. However, booting to PVE crashed and reset the BIOS the first time. Second time PVE boot fine and then hung while I tried to login to the console. 3rd boot I went straight to memtest86 and I'm waiting on a complete 1st pass.

Anyone have recommended BIOS settings for this box? Suggestions of what else to poke at?

edit: Oh look at that... they shipped me the 5825U.

 

[alaricljs]

Just a hard power-off and back on from memtest86 causes the BIOS to reset to defaults. I had to do it because the keyboard doesn't get numerated if you detach and re-attach it.

 

[alaricljs]

My PVE issue is definitely related to Fan control and resulting temperatures. When PVE boots the fans ramp down, the heatsink gets toasty and poof, the OS hangs.

Anyone know how to get PVE or the kernel to leave the fans alone? The BIOS has a complete set of controls that work fine.

 

[alaricljs]

OK, Not the fans - figured out how to force the fan situation in BIOS and PVE still hangs a little while after boot.

 

[alaricljs]

So it's the BIOS, installed the earlier version and it works. That one doesn't have the setting for specifying the iGPU RAM size so that sucks.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

 

[cowonmars]

I saw a product from this company on Amazon... super cheap. Thanks for the experience notes - seems like such a hassle.

 

[alaricljs]

It's the same CWWK you'll find in the popular threads here. This is just the cost of buying a Chinese budget platform. Once I get things ironed out I'll have a system quite unlike anything else for size and power also capable of sipping 11w idle. 3x PCIe x4 slots via m.2, 8 core 4Ghz cpu, 64GB RAM, and 4x 2.5Gbps nics.

 

[alaricljs]

Well that was certainly a weird journey. I have pinned down the issue to a particular BIOS setting and I don't know if it's PVE settings, Linux kernel, or really just the BIOS doing a dumb that causes PVE to crash. For iGPU configuration if I select UMA_SPECIFIED that allows you to select a frame buffer which I was setting to 64M seeing as how PVE is just a text console. Turns out UMA_SPECIFIED is the setting that makes PVE vomit. I tried setting the frame buffer size to 256M, 1G, and then gave up and set the iGPU config back Auto (NOT the frame buffer size). PVE works fine this way and lspci reports that the card is assigned 256M, so I'm willing to accept that.

Now on to stress testing...

 

[alaricljs]

Started to stress test and was not impressed. A quick 2s jump to nearly 4Ghz and then it quickly slid back...

Changed BIOS settings:
54W POR config - not available in the 2022.10.9 BIOS
PBO - Enabled
PBO Scalar - 2x

Now it boosts to 4.6Ghz all cores for a few seconds until it realizes it's sucking way too much power (125w at the wall from a 120w supply). Runs consistently at 4.0-4.2Ghz for as long as I bother while it sucks down 95-105 watts and sits at 100C with the fan maxed.

With these settings and nothing but PVE running (1 NIC at 1G, 2 sata SSDs) the boot process will fluctuate between 15w and 35w and finally settle at 8-9w post boot while running nothing at all.

 

[Zer0_C00L]

Do you think this is a power supply limit, thermal or an actual hardware limitation?

 

[alaricljs]

100C thermals? Definitely that. If it weren't a custom board I'd have hope for a bigger hsf. More fan isn't going to do it.

 

[alaricljs]

Just in case anyone has ideas like mine.... This mobo is really susceptible to RFI/EMF. I had the case sides off because the 2 SATA SSDs I'm using definitely don't fit inside and for the airflow. I was suffering the occasional hard crash and getting irritated by it but not enough to find the time to figure out why. Then in prep for my end-goal I soldered in pins and added a lead for remote a power switch and left that dangling. The box crashed 3 times that one day. So I pulled the lead off, threaded the SATA cables through the vent slots on the appropriate side panel and fully reassembled the case. No more crashes.

 

[tigo]

That's a hell of a journey! Is it now properely solid! Assuming running Promox, with a opnsense / pfsense + other VMs? or? stable....

 

[alaricljs]

Proxmox + Docker w/: portainer, nginx proxy manager, & semaphore. Working on Loki, Grafana, ...

VMs:
pfsense,
windows for a specific use of web browser so set up to sleep most of the time
arch dev box for Hyprland


It's been rock solid since I sealed the case, so next step is putting the pfsense VM into production.

 

[sp2712]

Hi, new guy here!
I got the same box and am having trouble getting proxmox to recognize dual m.2 nvme. I suspected it’s the bios but the version on the cwwk support site is date 10.9.2022 which is older than the current one.

where can I find the latest bios? (I’m also reaching out to cwwk in parallel)

 

[alaricljs]

Last time I talked to cwwk.net they provided this: 畅网官方网盘

I don't actually run the newest BIOS but the 8/8/2022 version due to the change in available controls in particular options around managing the max power and iGPU settings.

 

[sp2712]

Thanks, I will try one of the older BIOS

 

[sp2712]

Did not work, doesn’t feel like a BIOS thing anymore. I’m going to find a Sata SSD and install proxmox on that instead of the NvMEs

 

[sp2712]

I noticed that (with both nvme plugged in), proxmox would recognize 1 of the drives, and then on the next reboot, recognize the other drive, and flip back and forth every reboot.