Things you will need:
- All the required hardware (cpu, motherboard, RAM, PSU, video card)
- Screwdriver/bit set
- A fairly large (T-20) torx screwdriver (for the CPU holder)
- A way to view VGA video signals (either a monitor with VGA support, or a VGA to HDMI adapter)
- A USB stick with a GPT partition table and a VFAT partition as the first partition
- A lot of patience
Here is the hardware I used, I don't have experience with any others:
- AMD EPYC 7543P CPU
- Samsung 16GB DDR4-3200 RDIMM memory sticks (eight of them, you want to max out your ram slots)
- ASRock Rack ROME8-2T motherboard
- ASRock Steel Legend SL-1000G 1000W PSU
- Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 CPU cooler
- XFX Swift Radeon 9060 XT GPU (more on this later)
First, read all the installation instructions that come with all this stuff. Read it all the way through before doing anything. Assembly is pretty standard if you've ever built a computer before. The CPU carrier is a bit weird, and getting it to latch/unlatch is a bit tricky. Follow the instructions and look up some videos on installing a cpu into the SP3 socket if you're struggling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX_4kIENsJg).
Be very careful when installing the motherboard into the faceplate. There's tabs above the ethernet ports that can end up, instead of going on top of the port, going inside the port instead. This will make your ethernet ports not work (for no apparent reason). You can pop the tabs into place with a knife or something, you don't need to disassemble if this happens.
Also, if you are using nvme, you should consult your motherboard's documentation on some jumper settings you may need. I had to move a jumper on my ASRock motherboard.
Once you have everything together, power the system on with the side of the case off. The system can take a long time (5+ minutes to boot). The ASRock motherboard has a 2 digit 8-segment display that shows the current status. AA/AB means booting into BIOS, A0 means booting into operating system. If the system hangs elsewhere (for a very long time) that error code can be decoded.
If you can't get into the bios, try the VGA port instead. I originally was trying with a MSI RX 480 from 2016, and the video card would not work reliably at all. I believe this is due to the fact that the RX 480 is a "hybrid" card that supported both legacy BIOS and UEFI systems, and the motherboard doesn't like cards like this. The more modern Radeon card above worked fine.
Once you're in the bios, you should use another machine to prepare the USB stick. On the stick you should place:
- The UEFI shell application (shellx64.efi from https://github.com/pbatard/UEFI-Shell/releases) place this in
\EFI\BOOT\bootx64.efion your USB stick - From https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=ROMED8-2T#Download download the latest BIOS and BMC, and unpack them to the root directory of the USB stick
- Download https://download.asrock.com/TSD/uflash_v12207.zip and put the socflash.efi on the root of the USB stick
Next, boot back into the BIOS with the USB stick inserted, you can use the 'instant flash' option in the BIOS to update the bios. Then use the boot option to boot onto the USB stick. It should dump you into an EFI shell. You can then, probably do something like the following:
FS0:
socflash.efi if=<BMC firmware file>
If both of those succeed, then you have updated your BIOS/BMC correctly. This can resolve several compatability issues.
Next, you can install your OS of choice. However, note if you are using drives from another machine, you may need to re-create the EFI boot entries. These can be managed via the bcfg command in the UEFI shell, or uefibootmgr under linux. I had this problem because my bootloader was installed as \EFI\GRUB\grubx64.efi, so, by, default, the BIOS won't boot that.