AMD Threadripper should be in Beta Stage

[azdaha]

I couldn't wait to get my hands on this thing. I dished out $2500 for the top of the line 1950X AMD Threadripper CPU and all approved, or "recommended" hardware components only to find myself with a big paper-weight. Unable to get POST, the motherboard, an ASRock X399 Fatal1ty Professional Gaming, has these lights that flash red. The various case fans, cpu cooler, even the Power-supply fan does NOT move. The motherboard comes with a gimmick they call "Dr. Debug", which is a 2-digit numbers display used to show POST error codes. I never even get that far.

After seeing numerous recalls, horror stories, failures from all over the world, and only a limited number of suppliers supporting the products thus far, the question should be asked if AMD Ryzen or at least their high-end products, Threadripper should've been shelved longer until the bugs are worked out by the various manufacturers or at least until more options are available for hardware support

• ASRock Fatal1ty X399 Professional Gaming TR4 ATX AMD Motherboard
• Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB 2 x 16GB DDR4-2666 PC4-21300 C16 Quad Channel Desktop Memory Kit
• ASUS Radeon RX-550 4GB GDDR5 Video Card
• EVGA SuperNOVA NEX750G G2 750 Watt 80 Plus Gold ATX Power Supply
• WD Black 512GB NVMe m.2 2280 PCIe Gen-3 Internal Solid State Drive
• Corsair Carbide Air 540 High Airflow White LED ATX Cube Computer Case - Black
• EVGA CLC 240 Liquid / Water CPU Cooler, RGB LED Cooling 400-HY-CL24-V1
• AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X 3.4 GHz 16 Core TR4 Boxed Processor

[chithanh]

Several other people have gotten a working Threadripper system, so it is not a general problem I guess.
PSU, CPU or mobo could be bad. Take a high-resolution photo of the TR4 socket and examine it carefully to rule out any damage to the pins.

Did you contact ASRock support about it? What did they say?

[azdaha]

Thanks for your interest and your replies. I did contact ASRock, but by the time I received a response I had already confirmed that there was a known issue with the specific Motherboard model. There are two manufacturers for the CPU Socket on the board: Foxconn and Lotes. Users have reported having difficulty closing the CPU Socket on the version of the motherboard manufactured by Foxconn. I had that same experience.

Although, I have to say, while I suspect the difficult-to-close CPU Socket may have contributed to the problem--especially if the board had been previously returned--the overall issue for me was a "bad" motherboard. After going through all the various diagnostic steps on the numerous PC components involved, I had narrowed it down to the board and/or the CPU itself. I took the board out of the case and removed everything from it except the Power Supply. Once the board was powered on, the same behavior was observed that had been shown while all of the components were plugged into the board.

Returning to the local store, Microcenter, with the board and CPU in hand, I learned that they ran out of the Threadripper 1950x. As I had a strong suspicion that the board was the problem--I took the CPU to be returned as a precautionary measure to avoid a second trip to the store--I exchanged the X399 Fatal1ty Professional Gaming board with a X399 Taichi. My suspicions were correct; the CPU was perfectly fine with the new Motherboard in place, as was everything else.

debianxfce I had tried all sorts of things, including using just a single memory stick, verify RAM slots were correct as indicated by the product manual, using all sorts of different combinations on the various RAM slots; nothing worked. I had also suspected that the problem may be with the PSU, especially as I believe I mentioned here even the PSU fan wasn't spinning when the system was powered on. Doing a rudimentary diagnostic test, as outlined on the manufacturer's website showed that the PSU was working and the fan was spinning. Additionally, the specification of the PSU, and the fact that AMD's own website shows it as one of the recommended/approved components, showed that the unit had more than enough power to support the simple setup; or at the very least the barebone configurations I had used to test it.

Thanks again for your interest. I hope this thread can help others in some way.

Last thing to note: The AMD Radeon cards have very poor performance with the OpenSource amdgpu driver; the proprietary version is only available for Ubuntu. Although, some Enterprise Linux distributions have been added more recently to the AMD Support page as officially "supported". As I had decided to install ArchLinux on the newly built system, the frustration of playing CS:GO on Steam helped me decide to return the Asus Radeon RX-550 GPU in favor of an NVIDIA GeForce GTX-750 Ti that I hadn't realized I owned. The improvement in gameplay was immediately evident. Though, as I'm sure many other gaming enthusiasts Linux users know, the Steam client lists Ubuntu only as officially supported, too. Nevertheless, I'll stick with Arch with a potential multi-boot setup for Fedora, Gentoo, or maybe even Ubuntu (for the games).
There is an unofficial build, or rather an early attempt by a Fedora user and AMD developer, to add the amdgpu-pro driver to Fedora through a custom kernel. However, that's in the early stages and may not work as intended and your mileage may vary. If you're using Ubuntu, you may want to consider using AMD/ATI GPUs; elsewhere on Linux, stick with NVIDIA. As much as it pains me to write that sentence after the fiasco with nouveau and Optimus support for Linux (or lack thereof) that went on seemingly for decades now, the NVIDIA drivers and tools overall are much more refined, due in no small part to the Linux Community developers.

And...I just realized that Mystro256 is a Senior Member on Phoronix He's the "Fedora user and AMD Developer" I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Small world

[Kano]

I habe got the a RX 550 myself. The problem is the Polaris 12 chip which is only supported by mesa 17+. Basically a new enough distro should work. With Debian this means Stretch will not be enough until there are backports available. Basically the chip itself is not that bad, but it lacks VAAPI OpenGL support needed for Kodi to decode HEVC 10 bit. This is only possble with mpv now. Intel Kabylake+ should work. To play games via Steam you should not have got so many issues. Check that mesa i386 is installed too and the s2tc for both archs. Nvidia is certainly simpler to use with older distros.

[azdaha]

I habe got the a RX 550 myself. The problem is the Polaris 12 chip which is only supported by mesa 17+. Basically a new enough distro should work. With Debian this means Stretch will not be enough until there are backports available. Basically the chip itself is not that bad, but it lacks VAAPI OpenGL support needed for Kodi to decode HEVC 10 bit. This is only possble with mpv now. Intel Kabylake+ should work. To play games via Steam you should not have got so many issues. Check that mesa i386 is installed too and the s2tc for both archs. Nvidia is certainly simpler to use with older distros.

The issue is driver/software support, of course. The hardware is there, great; but if the resources are not there to create and support the needed software for their products, then the hardware means nothing.

I just returned the RX-550 to Microcenter, as I already had an NVIDIA card that's older but still works much better on Linux. Call it naivety, stupidity, or arrogance, but I ended up buying a new RX-580, hoping that the upgrade would, at least, come closer to the older NVIDIA card. What a waste of time, money, effort. The problems are still there, same as with the RX-550.

With respect to the Polaris 12 chip and mesa, I have Gentoo installed as well as ArchLinux. If "newer" distributions were the solution, I would think that ArchLinux would definitely work. Using Gentoo, I am able to specify the "amdgpu radeonsi" drivers, since the latter in the list is used for mesa. AMD is, reportedly, making an effort to support Ubuntu, but the last time I had tried to use the RX-550 with Ubuntu, it was just as bad as any other Linux distribution. I hate Nvidia for various reasons, the most recent one being their hostile actions to purposefully and needlessly restrict PCI passthrough to Linux VM guests; but, given the very limited number of options in the GPU space, there's nothing worthwhile out there, IMO.