Recommended hardware and linux distro for strix halo

High-Performance Computing Machine Learning, LLMs, & AI
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Since the platform and options are evolving so fast I want to validate with the community before pulling the trigger on something. I want it to be my workstation and daily driver, ocasionally play video games. I’ll use it heavily for AI inference and some dev work as well.
My starting point is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgKvVaBHzUA
I’ve watched virtually all online reviews on the new mini pcs with strix halo and I think I’m going to get the framework desktop motherboard, though there’s a case to be made to get the minisforum ms-s1 max. For linux distro I want to try CachyOS or Omarchy, I like the idea that most of the decisions have already been made and it supports llama.cpp with ROCm and Vulkan relatively smoothly.
What do you guys think? anything I’m missing?

Thanks,
Leo

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Check this out- GitHub - kyuz0/amd-strix-halo-toolboxes
Work your way backwards to the distro of choice.
If it were me, I’d choose either Nobara (fedora based) or Omarchy

1 Like
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If portability isn’t a primary concern, a custom desktop with a dedicated AMD GPU and the Framework motherboard sounds like the best fit for your heavy AI workloads, gaming, and development.

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I didn’t consider getting a discrete GPU but is it possible to somehow speed up pp or tg with it?

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Sounds like you already got it. Which OS did you go with in the end?

Plus, what pp and tg are you getting, are they unexpected given existing benchmarks, and what do you hope to get?

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I didn’t buy it yet but I’ll be pulling the trigger in the next few days. I’ll go with Omarchy, we’ll see how it goes.
As soon as I get it I’ll post my benchmarks. I’ll be running gpt-oss-120b or llama4-scout at the beginning, I’m curious how much the tg will degrade using a big context.

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I picked up a Bosgame version as was cheapest I could find and love it. I am running Proxmox and have a bunch of containers and then a Ubuntu 25 VM with gpu passthru and then just running Ollama and Steam - been working great for me, really great miniPC - love being able to game and run AI / Home Assistant on this box.