AMD 9700X and DeskMini X600

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In four years, barriers have really been broken in terms of speed. Single Thread Performance towards double and Total Performance well above double. And all that in a tiny little box that fits easily into my rucksack. Say Goliath in the bottle, say PharlapIII. That happened in the range of 65W TDP CPU’s, the AMD Ryzen 4650G was a revolution and then there is 9700X, crushing records in that TDP class. Very impressive!

Ryzen from the dead

About updating the BIOS in order to get it running, it was a nightmare with a happy ending.

ASRock’s page on BIOS updating lists actually two ways to update the BIOS in order to use the new generation Ryzen CPU’s. It is easy to overlook the second alternative named “FlashBack”. On YouTube, ASRock explains the procedure. I’m going to summarise:

  1. BIOS files can be found here:
    • Download the latest BIOS file from “global” under heading “BIOS”
      • This is a ZIP file, unpack in order to get the .ROM file
      • Rename the .ROM file to “PSPBIOS.IMG”
    • Download the file under “BIOSUBU”, from “global” and make sure you pick the right one, AMD 9700X is “Granite Ridge”.
      • This is a ZIP file too, unpack in order to get the .BIN file
  2. Prepare a USB device in a MS Windows environment, stick:
    • 32 GB or bigger (For me 8 GB worked well)
    • Formatted FAT32, 16 kB allocation unit size (why?), and empty
    • Copy the files BIOSUBU.BIN and PSPBIOS.IMG to the USB device
  3. Prepare boot:
    • Unplug, count to 10 and plug-in the power.
    • Insert the USB device into the corresponding port, front port (back port did the job for me)
  4. To start BIOS Flashback: Press the power button for about 3 seconds until the blue LED near the button starts blinking, release your finger immediately. Ventilator should be running too now.
  5. When the light stops flashing, the update is complete

What exactly went wrong, I don’t know but I had to flash the BIOS eight times, with four different USB flash drives, clearing the BIOS again and again, switching USB ports. Different power supplies and even taking everything apart again, checking the pins of the CPU, the contacts of the DDR5 modules, switching NVME. I had almost given up and then, suddenly, I saw a hard disk LED flickering. The BIOS update had succeeded after all. Why was it so difficult? I have no idea.

Stability

In the beginning I’ve had several uncomfortable “green screen of death” situations but right now it feels stable. Could it be that there is some initial active hardware remapping? No idea, I was under the impression that remapping is a factory process only. Perhaps it was a kernel issue.

Specs:

Initial configuration:

  • ASRock DeskMini X600
  • AMD Ryzen 7 9700X
  • Noctua NH-L9a-AM5
  • 96 GB RAM: Kingston Technology KVR56S46BD8-48 SODIMM DDR5-5600 (2x)
  • 2 * 4TB System + Storage: WD Black SN850X 4TB NVMe M.2 80mm PCIe G4 (1x)
  • 1 * 8TB Rsnapshot: SSD Samsung EVO 870 for
  • FrankenNIC

Power usage

This published power consumption of the configuration is somewhat higher than a Deskmini X300 with an AMD 4650G Pro.

The configuration is very responsive. This creates high spikes in power consumption that you don’t see in the table. It feels somewhat nervous and at the same time festive, like a ride in a BMW M2.

Fan noise: The Noctua is a must to suppress noise. However, it spins up often and is very responsive to power spikes. You may want to tune it in the BIOS, accepting higher CPU temperatures. It is not annoying but yes, I hear the the fan from time to time.

Processes like FFmpeg and Blender are run extremely fast but in doing so, consumption also often goes well over 100 Watts, well over the 65 Watt thermal design power TDP is what I suspect.

Following are some comments on the interpretation of the table.

  • All table values do not include peak values. High and low values were measured over a period of approximately 1 minute.
  • “Idle on with Debian” is a clocked value over 40 samples some time after startup. There are quite a few USB devices connected so it is safe to say that the consumption idle with just a wired keyboard and mouse is around 13 watts. Considering the number of cores, that’s not a bad result.
  • Using Windows in a virtual machine (VirtualBox) is immediately a hefty extra burden because it consumes more than Linux and also starts all kinds of processes that run for long periods of time, such as indexing, telemetry data harvesting and anti-virus actions.
    • Normally it is not really interesting but when I work off grid and a virtual machine is not needed for a while, I close it, pause it, with RightCtrl-p.
    • Virtual machines, especially Windows, are irritating power guzzlers.

History

If you are interested…

Pharlap I 2020

For our work, a fast CPU and lots of memory is never a luxury. Virtual machines take up RAM, some processes claim all computing power for long times and for CAD, STP, Single Thread Performance is especially important.
So in 2020, Pharlap emerged with an AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 4650G with some fat hard drives for data and backup.

Pharlap II 2023

After a data reorganisation and availability of larger SSDs and NVME modules, in 2023 it proved feasible to build a server workstation based on a DeskMini X300. We had previously deployed DeskMini’s with great success so this was a logical thought. With that, Pharlap’s MLM, Mid Life Modernisation, became a reality. Keywords are Linux, systemd networkd, NFS, Rsnapshot (8TB SSD for 4TB NVME), FrankenNIC (WIFI M.2 > M.2 A+E to Mini PCIe > NIC). Being able to work completely off grid, anywhere, is very important to us. And there are no worries about theft, the Deskmini simply disappears into a mini backpack when we are on the road.

Pharlap III 2024

The DeskMini X600, combined with AMD 9700X and lots of RAM is a huge leap forward, both in terms of speed and possibilities. Cutting edge technology is nice but then there are bumps to be solved, so be it. But the comparison between 2020 and 2024, more or less doubling speed remains remarkable.

An interesting step is changing from Ubuntu to Debian. Saying good bye to Xubuntu breaks my heart a bit but Debian has evolved into easier, more user friendly while remaining more pure and being the source of many distro’s. So far I am happy and “snaps” are history.

The current setup appears to be working extremely well. Some keywords:

  • Networkd, systemd, tight definitions
  • NFS, data access only for some identified computers
  • LUKS, really everything encrypted, I sleep so much better these days!
  • Rsnapshot internal backup plus some rotating off-line 3.5’ disks plus Rsync to an NFS client.

2 thoughts on “AMD 9700X and DeskMini X600”

  1. Thank you for this, yes it is a very interesting combination – as long as no heavy GPU is needed…

    Have you measured the power in idle mode and typical working situations? What about noise?

    I am thinking of equipping a X600 with a Ryzen 5 7600x3D CPU for use as a audio workstation.

    Reply

    • Hi, I’ve added some power characteristics. There is also a new BIOS-update, should install it. Before recording audio it might be handy to kill all unnecessary processes and tune your fan profile in BIOS to more conservative. On one hand I regret buying a machine that uses a bit more power but on the other hand: it is blazing fast! I also had some stability issues but they are gone without actions from my side, could be a kernel issue, no idea.

      Reply

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