Asus ROG Strix GL702ZC

[tocsa]

Has the GPU on the GL702ZC been used for any interesting computational purposes? The Ryzen 7 CPU on this is great, but for GPGPU such as machine learning, it seems nvidia/cuda is the way to go for now.

My last two machines had SLI nVidias (Clevo P570WM and MSI GT80 Titan). I'll probably use the Strix soon for some exercises, but hearing about the overheat I have some fear. I also won't have time at all to perform any speed comparisons. Technically the AMDs are not bad for GPGPU purposes, but machine learning is a special niche, you don't need double precision there.

[tocsa]

So before I'd start to really use the Lubuntu, I decided to go for a non systemd distribution. Going back to my roots before Ubuntu I picked Devuan. Now Devuan ascii is based on Debian testing. I still had to do a lot of weight lifting to use a 4.14 kernel instead of 4.9. I also shoot myself in the foot with the Intel 8265 AC: although 4.9 supports it the firmware comes from the non-free package branch. So I suffered a lot. Also, Devuan being a direct Debian derivative is not capable of secure boot due to lack of UEFI certificates. Not knowing that I put in many hours to troubleshoot, utilized a USB DVD drive, multiple pen drives. In summary the whole experience was like with the MSI GT80 (wifi didn't work and with the MSI I was not able to put two NVMe SSD into soft/hard RAID and after two days of trying I settled with a btrfs based RAID0). You almost need a PhD for this.

[blueweb]

My last two machines had SLI nVidias (Clevo P570WM and MSI GT80 Titan). I'll probably use the Strix soon for some exercises, but hearing about the overheat I have some fear. I also won't have time at all to perform any speed comparisons. Technically the AMDs are not bad for GPGPU purposes, but machine learning is a special niche, you don't need double precision there.

Please post any interesting results.

I've read AMDs are not bad for GPGPU, but the issue is with software/libraries. Compare the CUDA and OpenCL columns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...rning_software I would have wanted to go with an NVIDIA GPU for this reason, but I'm not aware of anything else comparable to the GL702ZC.

[bridgman]

The table seems to be missing ROCm support - I'll see if we can get someone to update it.

AFAIK most of the major packages are already running on HIP+ROCm.

https://insidehpc.com/2016/12/hip-caffe-porting-profiling-amds-rocm/

https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP

[blueweb]

The table seems to be missing ROCm support - I'll see if we can get someone to update it.

AFAIK most of the major packages are already running on HIP+ROCm.

https://insidehpc.com/2016/12/hip-caffe-porting-profiling-amds-rocm/

https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP

That would be great, even if only to inform, as I hadn't heard of ROCm. Online searches show a lot of skepticism, with claims of buginess and lack of timely support/development from AMD. Most ML practitioners probably aren't developing libraries and just want to use the tools with minimal hassle, and it seems there's only one game in town for that. I hope I'm wrong.

[bridgman]

Yeah, ROC is pretty new and there was some bugginess in the earlier releases. Right now use of it is scaling up fast and we are trying to stay ahead of the new use cases, but I would expect that the more recent releases are being reported as pretty stable.

If you are seeing something different on the more recent releases hints would be appreciated so we can go find & fix the issues.

[tocsa]

1. Somewhat off-topic: I just realized that the laptop has a combined headphone/mic jack outlet. Will that be compatible with Apple MD827LL/A EarPods? Folks say it's TRRS compatible. I haven't ever had a laptop with combined outlet.
2. I'm starting to migrate my work to this new laptop. Overnight I left it to import a database. That takes 3-4 hours, so by the morning around 7:20am it was probably all idle for several hours. And then suddenly the fans started to blow 100% and the machine was unresponsive. My heart sank thinking about the at least two cases of fried fan controller circuits, but my machine should not have been under load, and definitely not under GPU load. Right now I'm still using my old laptop, so I have not have the time and courage to turn it on yet.

[tocsa]

One addition for all the owners: this laptop has the Delta 330W power supply which I'm all familiar with because of past SLI Clevo laptops and SLI MSI GT80 Titan. What I can tell is that you won't be able to use this from a car outlet. Although the laptop may not consume more than 200-300W including the PSU + dissipation, but that Delta PSU has so huge and powerful high voltage side capacitors that for example if you unplug the PSU completely the LED stays on for almost 1.5 minutes (watch this is about an old 300W Chicony for a Clevo P180HM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0DGbAs_VwU) just running off of the capacitors. This causes trip protections to deny supply even if the outlet is 300W certified. I travel to conferences and Amtrak and Greyhound outlets can handle the PSU (that's mainly the bottleneck, not the laptop). Airline seat outlets sometimes cannot handle it, and car outlets definitely cannot. Because of car travels I tried even the Yeti 400 (https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Zero-400...0883048&sr=8-2) and that cannot take it. You can get around the initial surge of the big capacitors to plugin the PSU in an outlet at your home and then quickly plug it into the battery, but even that did not help. I ended up buying noname one https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1 , although I was very fearful, but that could power the laptop, and it's even lighter than a Yeti 400. Just FYI.

[blueweb]

2. I'm starting to migrate my work to this new laptop. Overnight I left it to import a database. That takes 3-4 hours, so by the morning around 7:20am it was probably all idle for several hours. And then suddenly the fans started to blow 100% and the machine was unresponsive. My heart sank thinking about the at least two cases of fried fan controller circuits, but my machine should not have been under load, and definitely not under GPU load. Right now I'm still using my old laptop, so I have not have the time and courage to turn it on yet.

Are you sure that's not a software issue?

[tocsa]

Are you sure that's not a software issue?

Possibly. I turned it back on and it's not spinning 100%. I think it must have been something that it decided to go hibernate and got choked or something when that happened. The timing was weird, just when I was close to it but noone touched it. I don't have swap partition because of SSD best practices (plus I have 32GB RAM).