Marcin Juszkiewicz

In the hunt for a development machine, I got to the next phase. I did some shopping, and there it is: my own Ampere Altra-based system.

Why?

As you may have read in my previous post, I used several AArch64 systems for local development. And the latest one, an Apple MacBook Pro, is nice and fast but has some limits — does not support 64k page size. Which I need for my work.

Let’s go cheap

So I have decided to buy myself an Ampere Altra system. As cheap as possible.

AArch64 server parts

The only part I needed to buy brand new was a motherboard. And the only “affordable” one was AsrockRack ALTRA8BUD-1L2T, which was a product for data centres (so I was told).

Next, a used processor. At first, the idea was to buy a Q64-22 (64 cores, 2.2 GHz clock), but when the seller on eBay was not responding, one of my friends decided to upgrade his Altra systems and offered me a Q80-30 (80 cores, 3.0 GHz clock).

The CPU requires cooling. There are not many options for the LGA 4926 socket. I found an Arctic Freezer 4U-M in one of the online stores here in Poland and bought the only one they had.

Each computer needs memory, right? So I went with used ones again, as there is a huge market for used server parts. I bought eight sticks of 16GB each; the model is SK-Hynix HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN. It is not present on the official Ampere Altra memory Approved Vendor List.

Working fine (after re-seating three sticks):

DRAM populated DIMMs:
  SK0 MC0 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN
  SK0 MC1 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN
  SK0 MC2 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN
  SK0 MC3 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN
  SK0 MC4 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN
  SK0 MC5 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN
  SK0 MC6 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN
  SK0 MC7 S0: RDIMM[ad:80] 16GB 3200 ECC 2R x8 RCD[32:86] HMA82GR7CJR8N-XN

Ordinary parts

The rest of the parts are ordinary ones available in any random store.

Computer case

The case was a challenge. The ALTRAD8UD-1L2T is a “deep MicroATX” case which means I needed a case that can take an EATX motherboard (they are a bit deeper than ATX).

I looked through pictures in online stores and selected about 10 candidates. Then I started watching reviews and crossed several of them out. Usually because the holes for handling cables were too close to the edge of a board.

Finally, bought an Endorfy 700 Air case. It came with five 120mm fans (3 at the front, one at the rear, and one on the top). There was a lot of space behind the motherboard’s plate for cabling, and a fan splitter so I could connect all five case fans as one to the motherboard.

And the PSU compartment has an extra hole for PCIe power cables!

Power supply

The ALTRAD8UD-1L2T motherboard is expected to be powered by a 12V PSU only. There is no connection port for the ATX 24-pin plug. Instead, there is an adapter that takes only power-on and power-good signals from it and connects to the small 4-pin port on the motherboard.

There are three EPS12V connectors available. I used two of them. The MSI MPG A850G power supply I bought comes with two such cables and has an option for connecting the third one.

The rest

What else is needed? Some NVME for storage (Lexar LM790 2TB) and a random graphics card (Radeon Pro WX2100, remembering the old times).

And I was ready to build the system.

How does it look?

The motherboard feels small once the CPU cooler is mounted. And a low-profile graphics card is almost invisible:

The back side of the case shows where I hid the ATX 24-pin adapter and most of the cables.

Price

Of course, if I went cheap, then how cheap did it end up being?

In total: 7 732 PLN (around 1 800 EUR). About 500 EUR more than I anticipated at first.

The CPU upgrade to 80 cores was extra 100 EUR. Memory came from another seller, as the first one ended their sale before I was ready to buy, resulting in an extra 40 EUR to the cost.

At first, I wanted to have 2GB per core, but with the CPU upgrade, I would have needed to go to 256 GB, and that would have been another 250-300 EUR extra.

The case had a 30% discount due to a promotion, and the NVME came with 7% cashback.

Plans

My current plans for this system are:

• install Fedora 42
• create some VM instances:
  • RHEL 9/10
  • CentOS Stream 9/10
• put a Radeon RX 6700XT inside and check whether it would work
• try to use it as a desktop
• do some crazy experiments

All Linux systems will have both 4k and 64k page size kernels.