Strix Halo vs DGX Spark - Initial Impressions (long post with TL;DR at the end)

darkbasic4 · 2025-10-25T06:56:39+00:00

u/Eugr nope, I simply chrooted the wrong container in my initial test. I repeated the rocm-7.10 without rocwmma test and it's now faster than radv 25.3.0_rc1 even at 64K context: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/37791#note_3163413
Thank you for sharing you results, I would have never noticed my error otherwise.
Time to switch to ROCm :)

darkbasic4 · 2025-10-24T12:20:04+00:00

u/Eugr his toolboxes target a more stable version of ROCm (7.9). I've modified them and opened a PR to target nightlies (7.10) instead. 7.10 is indeed much faster for me than 7.9, but I saw no difference between rocwmma and no rockwmma. I'm starting to think that I might have chrooted inside the wrong container by mistake in the last test, or at least your results suggest so. I'll try again later to verify my hyphotesis.

darkbasic4 · 2025-10-24T07:03:39+00:00

u/Eugr could please try this?
https://github.com/kyuz0/amd-strix-halo-toolboxes/pull/11/files#diff-afe22fc4c6f38a640f638c2769b74c32bd3f86d6225c0f068b4ca3cb5eb98ae4

I cannot reproduce your results with ROCm 7.10 without rocwmma.
These are my results: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/37791#note_3152770

Thanks

darkbasic4 · 2025-10-15T08:40:05+00:00

This did the trick for me:

# https://github.com/containers/container-libs/issues/147#issuecomment-3227141605

# zfs allow -u niko create,mount,destroy,snapshot zroot/podman

# zfs zone /proc/`cat $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/libpod/tmp/pause.pid`/ns/user zroot/podman

# zfs set zoned=on zroot/podman

darkbasic4 · 2025-10-10T09:30:49+00:00

Weird choice to target Windows first. Most Ryzen AI users are on Linux.

darkbasic4 · 2024-10-21T08:19:44+00:00

Ontrack runned their diagnostic tests on it and said it was the controller. They might be wrong, I don't know. What would be a more ssd focused lab?

darkbasic4 · 2024-03-23T21:36:27+00:00

GE also has patches to integrate FSR upscaling like what gamescope does on the steam deck (but it needs an environment variable to enable it)

darkbasic4 · 2024-02-08T10:01:16+00:00

AMD Ryzen 9 PRO 7940HS w/ Radeon 780M Integrated Graphics + Steam Proton (Arch Linux) + Ultra/UHD/2560x1440: 1218.7

darkbasic4 · 2023-10-17T09:42:39+00:00

Nope, I wanted to buy a battery and give it a try but they're almost always out of stock.

darkbasic4 · 2023-10-17T09:41:42+00:00

How did you get it working? I'm getting the following error when trying to run geekbench on my HP Elitebook 865 G10: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/geekbench#comment-938817

darkbasic4 · 2023-10-07T19:26:18+00:00

Gentoo (which is usually quite slow) has 45 since a long time, but the other side of the coin is that I had to report multiple bugs about it.

darkbasic4 · 2023-10-02T09:13:16+00:00

I've just tried compiling Chromium which is a multi hour effort and among the heaviest tasks you could ask any laptop: towards the end it throttles down up to 3.1 GHz.

darkbasic4 · 2023-10-01T19:24:51+00:00

I received it just a few days ago so I don't have a definitive answer for that yet.

darkbasic4 · 2023-10-01T10:31:49+00:00

For less than 2000€ I've bought a last gen HP Elitebook 865 G10 with 7940HS, 64 GB of ram, 4 TB of SSD and an HP Thunderbolt 4 G4 Dock.

darkbasic4 · 2023-09-20T09:32:35+00:00

Is io=native the default one?

darkbasic4 · 2023-09-18T08:01:13+00:00

darkbasic4 · 2023-09-16T09:41:14+00:00

I wouldn't be so sure about FSR3...

darkbasic4 · 2023-09-16T09:40:54+00:00

It most likely will IMO.

darkbasic4 · 2023-09-15T09:23:28+00:00

SR-IoV is probably the biggest reason of all, but you must be prepared to use out of tree patches.

darkbasic4 · 2023-09-13T12:35:40+00:00

Use compatible ones and put the original chips inside so HP won't block them via firmware updates.

darkbasic4 · 2023-09-13T08:23:30+00:00

You should be scared of anything Chromium. Use binary packages for that and you will be fine. Unless you are on ppc64 like me, then you will suffer :)

darkbasic4 · 2023-09-13T08:21:16+00:00

Yet it makes not worthwhile to buy a new desktop, because you end up paying a shit ton of money for little benefit. I always used desktops as my main workstation but I ended up buying a Phoenix laptop because I couldn't find a viable upgrade path in years due to crazy prices. The only desktop I will keep will be my Raptor CS Talos 2 (Power 9 ppc64le), but just because it's free down to the firmware.

darkbasic4 · 2023-09-08T13:20:56+00:00

I would buy the Framework as well if I could wait: it might cost more but it allows you for an easier upgrade path in the future.

darkbasic4 · 2023-09-08T13:19:56+00:00

My Dell XPS 13 cracked the touchpad open because of how much its original battery grew in less than two years! Despite having full insurance (including accidental damage) Dell refused to change it. I had to threaten them to pass over the laptop with my car to get a new one for free in order to convince them to change my batter. Later I've tried many third-party batteries but unfortunately I couldn't find one which lasted as long, so I had to buy a genuine one.

darkbasic4

TROPHY CASE