@Danny_Goff, In addition to be above, and if you have one lying around, you can try with an active cable. Most eGPU enclosures and docks come with short, < 1m passive cables. They can work just fine for their length but doesn’t hurt to try an active cable which will help maintain signal integrity.
If you don’t have one, they can be quite expensive, especially if Intel TB certified, so not much point in buying one just for the experiment, unless you have use for it.
The high pitch whine is due to the fan cutout on the case resonating with the cooling fan.
Yes, though presumably getting the fan to run at lower speeds / less frequently should ameliorate the issue to an extent… I notice immediately that the Ryzen board is much quieter in my machine than the Intel board ever was. Just a warning to anyone planning the Cooler Master swap that the noise is quite noticeable in a quiet room.
I was thinking about dremeling out the fan cutout and just having a giant hole, but the case is too beautiful for me to do that.
I received my Zen 4 board almost a week ago now but I’m just now getting Crucial RAM for it, so I’ll be enjoying the upgrade shortly.
Okay. So I figured out the standalone mode situation, and you are going to really hate the answer, since it makes using it as a server much more…irksome.
a) The red/blue LED blinkies will persist for at least 3-5 minutes until it stabilizes and turn white, in which case the HDMI expansion port will activate. I am not sure what the board was doing at this time.
b) The USB-C power injection must, MUST be on the front 2 ports (the ones on the left/right closer to the bottom when held vertically), and you really should have a 100w USB-PD adapter to push power onto the board. The 65w will work…eventually, but not until a ridiculous amount of time elapsed, and you will be staring at the red/blue lights for quite a while until “something” happens.
c) I can’t seem to disable secureBoot or disable its enforcement (which is a feature on the 11th/12th Gen Intel boards), so any SSD that was not configured for Secureboot…simply won’t boot (so a drive I configured using the 12th gen Intel board for Proxmox 7.3 simply refuses to boot)
d) No options to control AMD-V or AMD-Vi, you can’t define the iGPU system RAM reservation size (its auto or game optimized, and I am not sure what that means)
Also, since standalone mode does not guarantee a display (it won’t be using the eDP port), it’s possible for the board to boot up to a state where you have no working display, and if you use a USB-C adapter with passthrough power, it does not seem to instantiate any connected HDMI port. This is much less refined than the behavior on both my 11th Gen and 12th Gen Intel boards.
Eh, so yeah, you almost certainly will need a Framework laptop chassis to configure it to work as a standalone mini-server on day 1, and to be honest, if you are going to have a Phoenix mini-server, you are probably better off with something like a Minisforum UM790 Pro. At least getting it to load the software that you need would likely be much less painful than it is at the current moment and you’ll likely pay less for the machine.
Just applied some PTM7950. I’m not sure if this stuff is magic or what, but prior I had to limit APU power to 20 W to keep temps under 70° C. Now it’s happily running Prime95 small FFTs and Furmark at a constant 28 W with a max temp of 69° (nice). Saw the same behavior running just Prime95 on its own, so the CPU was guzzling all 28 W.
And this is just me starting run #1 of the settling process. I’ll try single thread once the pad is sufficiently “cured.”
EDIT: Heat cycle #2, just P95 this time. Fan took a while to ramp up, allowing temps up to 74° C before cooling back down under 70. Holding steady there again. Not gonna do a play-by-play, but it was an interesting behavior. Perhaps the fan started high on run #1 due to a hotspot somewhere that’s now “filled in” as the pad expanded.
EDIT 2: After about 2 hours of heat cycling, all-core loads still float around 70° C, GPU loads end up around 65°, and combined end up just under 70° together. 1T Prime95 ended up quickly bringing temps over 90, but now all I think the chip needs is a temp limit. Anything needing all 28 W will spread the heat out enough for the pad to quickly soak it up into the heatsink.
Just need Framework to add temp/PPT limit options in the BIOS. Desktop Zen has had these controls exposed forever, but on mobile for some reason it’s only possible with 3rd party programs (the Linux versions of which need secure boot disabled).
even though i doubt it, but just in case you missed it: the secure boot settings are not in the “bios” settings, but an extra menu option in the “overview” menu… cost me some time/googling as well.
It took me a good hour before I realized this. During that time I had hunted down a USB to install Ubuntu directly on to (because I couldn’t use my Ventoy USB) and in general had gotten started installing the OS when I realized that I had missed the separate option.
I know nobody here can do anything about this and it’s not Framework’s fault, I’m just whining- my upgrade kit seems to have gotten lost at Fedex’s Memphis hub. It’s been stuck as “Pending” there for almost a full week now. I’m going to try having someone I know who works for Fedex check up on it.
At least I can let others hammer out the issues! </cope>
Well, that’s another problem. The “administer secureboot” menu on the 13th Gen core/Ryzen machines pre-suppose that you didn’t have any non-secureboot media attached to the machine, or else it’ll require the end user to power the machine off, remove the media, navigate to the menu, turn it off, wait for the memory training to happen, then power it back up again and go through the rigamarole. For 96GB of RAM the process can take 15-20 minutes per power-on. This seems like one of those “this needs to be documented on day 1” situations.
I found that I did not have to do any of this, I just used F2 (The bios key as documented) to get to the menu before it could try to load from my ssd, then I was able to disable secure boot without removing any boot media. Maybe since I have a battery connected, the RAM training was only for the first boot, but if you keep tapping F2 while booting, it should work.
Okay, but did you start with the Ryzen board in the FW13 laptop chassis first, or the Coolermaster case? With the board installed in the FW13 laptop chassis you will not have the red/blue blinkies, and the machine will work just fine. The RAM training will take a bit but it’ll boot up within 5 minutes or so, even with 96GB of DDR5-5600. The standalone mode issue will not matter, the machine will have a working display (since it’s on the built-in eDP port) and you would be able to bypass any boot issue by holding F12 to select the device, or yeah, hit F2 to go to the BIOS screen.
However, if you start on the Coolermaster case, you will get the red/blue blink storm, often for a while until “something” works itself out, and then it’ll be possible to get the stable white LED and power it up (which it manage to do 40% of the time - maybe it has to do with the fact that I had standalone mode turned ON and standalone mode detection turned OFF the first time I swapped the board on my FW13 from the current Alder Lake to the Phoenix Ryzen just to attempt to figure out WTF happened). Otherwise, you can attach a USB keyboard onto it and you can keep hitting F2 or F12, it won’t do anything whatsoever.
So generally, here’s what you’ll need to do if you bought the Ryzen FW13 board and only plan to run it standalone (on a Cooler Master case), and you are without an FW13 laptop chassis:
a) If you don’t plan to run/install anything with a Secureboot shim pre-baked (i.e. any of the BSDs, VMWare ESXi, XCP-ng (which is based on old Citrix tech) or Proxmox 7.x which is based on Debian 11), make sure that you don’t have the install media connected to the machine OR the OS pre-installed the content of the SSD, or it’ll never boot. In fact, I would not even put an NVMe drive onto the slot and use the smallest slowest RAM you have at your disposal (I dunno, borrow some DDR5-4800 8GB SODIMMs from a local IT shop?) so the training will not take as long.
b) Mount it into the Coolermaster case, and put the case cover back on. Or if you are particularly brave, tape the chassis opening switch down with Gaffer’s tape and run it bareback. Your call.
c) Grab a USB-PD cable/power source to the front left USB-C expansion module (if you lay the board flat with the writing right-side-up, it’s the one on the left side closest to you), put the USB-A module on the front right for the keyboard (if you have one), and use the front right for HDMI or Displayport module output. Plug it in and feed it power. It should start the red/blue blink storm for the next 5-10 minutes. I’ve had it storm for at least 30 minutes with 96GB of RAM. Then eventually it’ll power up and go white. Maybe it’s RAM training, perhaps it’s something else - The board thinks it’s cosplaying one of those LAPD spinners from Blade Runner. Or maybe I should put on some psytrance and let it enjoy its mini-rave.
c) Once it fires up, it’ll report no valid boot devices and go directly onto the main setup screen when the error was acknowledged. It’ll then go into an Insyde H2O BIOS screen. One of the option is to disable Secureboot enforcement. Do that first (the option is disallowed if you have a non-Secureboot boot device and you tried to boot off it), and then it should restart itself. The restart should be much faster and you should not see the red/blue blink storm.
Then you can go to setup and turn on Standalone mode, save and restart. Verify that standalone mode is turned off. Do not remove power since the red/blue storm will come back. Note that you will NOT need to turn off Secureboot if you are going to a sufficiently modern OS, like Win10/11, Debian 12, latest Ubuntu/Fedora releases, etc, or if you wish, figure out how to boot-shim FreeBSD via Microsoft’s secureboot key and Hashtool.
d) Once this happens, install whatever you need. Once you get to this stage the board should be reliable enough for standalone use with the Cooler Master case. Note that by spamming F2 repeatedly later on, you should be able to get Secureboot turned back on (do this at your own risk).
Where did you buy it? Perhaps a link if available. Hoping one of you is European so I can get it from the same place.
Got it from this Amazon seller in the US. From my brief look at amazon.de, good chance you can get it in the EU too, though the price was a bit steep.
I ordered some from Moddiy. I believe they are in Europe, so you should be good. Not the cheapest place, but they claim all their products are genuine. Hard to be sure with some of the sellers on Amazon and elsewhere.
The European Amazon mentioned that we can’t ship to our location…
I noticed that but they didn’t have a picture. Did you order this one?
@Arjun_Swamy @LeeNeighoff What are the physical dimensions of the CPU / contact surface, by the way? There don’t seem to be datasheets or design drawings or anything available, neither on the AMD nor on the Framework side. I can make a rough guess based on the Framework-provided footprints for the mainboard, but it’s probably easier to just ask 
Yup, that’s the one. I haven’t used it yet, but I have it ready to go, lol.
I didn’t measure when I was applying as I basically just cut a close enough piece and trimmed til it was a similar size to the die. But, based on my leftover sheet of ptm7950, its around 17.5mm x 13mm.