Flame Linux Hardware - sanity check

This is in your home? I can’t wait for the Randy “Cribs” tour. I’m expecting no less than 3 X-boxes integrated in to furniture and plumbing.

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Only Fans is coming before Cribs.

Is that because you’ll be in Vegas next week? sounds specific.

Pricing in different locations is tricky, but in the spec listed above, whatever the actual “box”, the majority of the cost is going to be CPU / GPU / RAM / Storage, so IMO there’s a lot of value in going with a supported box like the P620 where you can just INSTALL_DKU and be mostly done (life’s too short to play Linux system integrator unless you enjoy that as a hobby…).

I wouldn’t say I’m in love with the P620: although better than your typical Supermicro box, the build quality doesn’t have quite the “premium” feel of a Dell or HP Z box, and the lack of working remote management on Linux means that you need some kind of external controlled PDU to power cycle the box remotely. But overall it’s a fast and competent Flame box that you shouldn’t have to mess around too much with to get going.

One caveat: not sure about 8.7, but Rocky Linux 8.5 doesn’t have the drivers to control the chassis fan speed on the P620, so if you have a bunch of hot cards in there (for instance a 100GbE network card), you’ll need to crank up the fan in the BIOS to avoid overheating, which can make the system louder than you might desire for a deskside setup. But that’s not unique to that system.

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Good to know about fans thanks, hopefully that gets sorted soon but I won’t be running anything too hot that doesn’t have its own cooling.

I’m intrigued to see if 2024 can compete on a fully specced Mac now it’s M native. Probably not.

@ManChicken you were talking about P620 fans the other day?

Yeah - the BIOS fan setting didn’t seem to actually do anything that I could tell, at least anecdotally based on noisiness, from increasing it from 4 to 7. The board presumably takes care of its self based on CPU temperature, but I thought it curious that while doing a bunch of 3D rendering at 100% CPU usage, I never heard anything really spin up that I could tell from the other room.

That said I’ve never heard alarm bells or had a hardware over-temp shutdown or anything, so perhaps I shouldn’t be that bothered about it. There’s a newer BIOS from last month which includes a rather vague note in the changelog:

Optimized the FAN table to support more complex configurations.

so I’m going to update sometime next week when I can and see if anything’s different.

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Thanks for the advice all. I’ve gone and ordered the P620.

For storage I’m going with a HighPoint SSD7540 and adding 8x4TB of gen4 SSD. In theory 32TB at 28GB/s. I need all the space I can get on this job so going to live dangerously with RAID0.

I was hoping to install 2024 - any reason not to?

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The licensing is horrid, or wretched, whatever you prefer. Otherwise there are some good stability improvements with Batch Paint, and we see no down side to using it as current in our productions.

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At least you spelled wretched right. :slight_smile:

2024 has been good for me in early stages of production. Typically if there was a big thingy we’d have discovered it by now.

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