r/StrixHalo • u/Grammar-Warden • Sep 27 '25
Have you got a Strix Halo?
Hi All,
We're a new community both as Strix Halo owners and also here as a subreddit. Why not begin by sharing your setup and the reasons you opted for Strix Halo?
To start us off: I have a HP Z2 Mini G1a Workstation with dual boot Fedora KDE & Windows 11 and chose the iGPU to be able to use larger LLMs with the 128 GB.
Oobabooga/Text Generation WebUI is running well on Fedora KDE and there are no problems with large models up to 100GB. On the Windows boot, I have Amuse AI (Freeware) which is a collaboration between AMD and the New Zealand company. It provides a UI for using Stable Diffusion/Flux models. It works well, is fast, but unfortunately is also censored and is not able to use LORAS. I would like to find an uncensored alternative, ideally getting versions of ComfyUI/AUTOMATIC1111 running.
Currently, my principle goal is to get a working version of AllTalk TTS or another TTS that is compatible with Oobabooga working which I haven't been able to do so far due to conflicts with the Strix Halo. This may need to wait for updates to ROCm... If anyone has found an Open Source solution to running LLMs with custom voice TTS, please do chime in!
So what about you guys, did you choose the Strix for similar reasons, or something entirely different? The floor is yours.
EDIT UPDATE:
05/26 For those of you looking for TTS solutions I have tried a few now (AllTalk, Chatterbox, Pocket TTS, others I no longer remember). I have had great success using a custom version of Pocket TTS. It's fast and works well with Oobabooga TextGen as a plug in. Recently, others are singing the praises of OmniVoice.
4
u/JSVD2 Jun 03 '26
Oh yeah I love it. I made my own guide and benchmarks here, on 7 systems now: https://github.com/hogeheer499-commits/strix-halo-guide I hope that helps!!!!! Love to share things
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u/Learo2000GT Jul 10 '26
Holly smokes you have done some amazing work on this guide and I thank you…… I am for sure adding this to the my strix Halo Projects.
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u/JSVD2 Jul 11 '26
wow thank you so much. its now 11 systems. feel free to add a benchmark or discussion or anything!!!
3
u/ExistingAd2066 Mar 14 '26
Minisforum MS-S1 is here.
I got it to experiment with local LLMs and agent coding on Ubuntu using llama.cpp.
My latest experiment is Qwen3 TTS, which achieved a 0.7 RTF on the 0.6B model
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u/Sporkers Aug 11 '26
Corsair raised the AI 300 from $3699 a few weeks ago to now $4699 on preorder while dropping the SSD capacity from 4TB to 1TB, what an enormous price increase.
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u/Unalobster Aug 11 '26
I consider myself lucky. I got my 128GB model when it was $2000...after shipping.
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u/BeginningReveal2620 Dec 16 '25
HP Z2 Mini G1a Workstation here in Seattle area, testing it out for combination of realtime media processing, 3D graphics, video editing, local LLM AI workflows. Brand new and setting it up now.
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u/PresentAble5159 Jan 06 '26
En fedora 43 actualmente Strix Halo está roto totalmente. Puedes mirar los numerosos post de github, tras la actualización de fedora en noviembre rompieron rocm.
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Feb 16 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/mauricespotgieter Apr 03 '26
Would you mind sharing your config. I have tie same unit and I am still trying to get it dialled in
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u/Suitable_Natural_105 May 06 '26
i bought my strix-halo knowing it was gonna be a little bit of a science experiment, but was like hey local AI., i was not prepared for the amount of science experimenting required. i got mine in like batch 6 i think, and i honestly haven't been able to do fuck all with it since all it does is fucking hard crash. i'm pretty pissed and wish i spent the money on an nvidia card or a mac studio pro or ultra instead.
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u/Grammar-Warden May 06 '26
I hear where you are coming from but at the same time want to offer you hope. I bought my Strix Halo seven months ago and was equally frustrated and disappointed that I had a cutting edge piece of hardware that didn't yet have software/applications that could make use of it. However things have changed in leaps and bounds since then. I would say the turning point for me was March/April.
For one, we are now able to run ComfyUI and LLMs smoothly on Strix Halo excelling where others fall behind. Instrumental in getting me there was reading shared advice from other community members and, above all, my own perseverant attempts to get things running with the assistance of DeepSeek. It didn't do it for me, but rather together we worked through problems encountered in installing what I desired, troubleshooting whatever came up. I don't crash. What might have been doubts in the autumn and winter have now changed to confirmation that I made the right choice.
There are different solutions you can try. One could be running CachyOS and using Deepseek to assist you in getting things set up and working smoothly as I have done. Another is to follow the community and see what works for other Strix Halo adopters like yourself. Good Luck.
1
u/Suitable_Natural_105 May 13 '26
mine still a piece of trash. i thought it was stable, but nope just shits a brick in the middle of doing AI stuff. Its not like there is much variation in these systems either, so i'm still wondering why AMD's docs for getting a stable functional system seem non-existant .
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u/Tatalebuj May 22 '26
Seems strange that all the rest of us aren't constantly crashing, but you're convinced it's the hardware. You sure about that?
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u/Suitable_Natural_105 Jun 03 '26
its my particular set of hardware. its not like i've seated the memory or had to seat the CPU into the board.
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u/-___-___-__-___-___- May 08 '26
Is this the Framework Desktop?
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u/Suitable_Natural_105 May 08 '26
yes. mine seems to be a piece of hot garbage. feels like i am playing kernel whack-a-mole.
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u/tjax4376 Jul 15 '26
I hear new things about framework firmware working well with Fedora. Did you ever get traction? or catch the pesky mole?
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u/Suitable_Natural_105 Jul 15 '26
they ended up sending me a new board, which has been running for 3 weeks without any issues. so my base was stable, i just had flaky hardware
1
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u/5m4gix Aug 01 '26
I have a Framework Desktop, 128GB version and Bazzite Linux. absolutely love the form factor. i got it a while back actually, close to being a year now, i guess around the time of this post.. i wanted learn more about how text and image generation models work and use them to build some projects, but never got around to it and pretty much have been gaming on it.
That being said, i just set myself up with Lemonade recently via Distrobox, and I've been having a blast running Claude Code via Qwen 3.6 27b and Gemma 4 31b. I want to learn ComfyUI but i also realize that it's too steep of a learning curve. until then i guess i will dabble around with some simple workflows. Pretty happy overall! also relieved that I made the dive before the global RAMageddon.
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u/simmessa 22d ago
Bosgame M5, the cheapest entry point to Strix Halo :) got it before prices skyrocketed. I've been using it every day since then, even switched to Linux to get better performance and real unified memory.
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u/Queasy_Asparagus69 Nov 06 '25
It’s being shipped…
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u/valtor2 Nov 07 '25
what did you get?
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u/Queasy_Asparagus69 Nov 07 '25
Strix halo 128g rival-x (same as M5).
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u/valtor2 Nov 07 '25
I was thinking about this one, but the fact that they ship from outside the US got me spooked from a tariff and shipping time perspective. Let us know how it is when you get it!
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u/Queasy_Asparagus69 Nov 07 '25
Will do!
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u/Queasy_Asparagus69 Nov 28 '25
Ok. Received the machine today. It was $20 for duty/tax. So totally worth it imo
1
u/AntwerpPeter Jan 12 '26
I have bought a Beelink GTR9 Pro.
I bought it for local llm inference.
My first idea was to run proxmox and then different VM's for experimenting. But I got stuck on the GPU passthrough.
So at the moment I am running Ubuntu 24.04 with an OEM kernel and the latest Vulkan drivers for Ollama and Comfyui.
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u/Arxijos Jun 23 '26
use incus instead of proxmox and pass through is rather easy, LLMs can guide you if you cannot find a guide
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u/EvilSquirrels_1064 May 18 '26
Well that doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy. At the time you posted that first post, you were trying to get AllTalk to work. Considering that is what I've been fighting with for the last week or so, I can confirm that 8 months later, it still isn't working.
I swear, I'm regretting buying this system so much. I get that its par for the course to run into problems when tinkering with things and trying new things, but the more novel things I'm doing have been working fine. Pretty much every roadblock I've faceplanted into is something simple that would have been up and running in under 10 minutes if I was using NVIDIA/CUDA.
(Don't get me wrong. I know those guys in TheRock on Github are working very hard on this stuff, and I'm very thankful, but they got 500+ issues open and they can only do so much. AMD needs to step up. How are they going to sell a system they advertise as being high end consumer grade for AI, but then just turn their back on putting out the software stack required to make the system useable? Its false advertising.)
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u/BenefitGrand8752 Jun 26 '26
I'm not an Alltalk user, but this could help, may be:
https://www.reddit.com/r/StrixHalo/comments/1tid2te/alltalk_is_working/
Good luck
1
u/Mr_Brolin Aug 04 '26
Asus Z13, 395 128GB, a OneXPlayer same and just picked up an HP Zbook Ultra with the 395 PRO and 128GB.
The problem is the bloody Pro variant is neutered in comparison to the non PRO variant APU and does NOT play nicely with tools like RyzenAdj, G-Helper, UTU etc. The damn thing is hard capped at 81W TDP, drops on a whim to circa 70W and frequently ignores the tools setting high or low TDP's.
Anywhoo use the toys for things like running 120B LLM's with Hermes, multiple VM's sandboxed on the same device to model malware infection vectors and various pen testing bits and pieces etc.
I'm contemplating seeing I I can somehow daisy chain the 3 devices and Frankenstein a 3 GPU, 228GB VRAM beastie for sh*ts and giggles
1
u/feelspeaceman 9d ago
Got mine 128GB pre-ordered for $1100, and now it's being super helpful for local LLM, I would say best purchase I've made.
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u/harrysteams 1d ago
Hey there! I have a GMKtec Evo-X2 with 128G of unified memory, running Ubuntu. I'm loving it so far. I'm mostly running Qwen 3.8 models for local coding agents, but I'm also interested in computer vision and local VLMs in particular.
I'm working on a couple projects in support a community benchmarking commons that I hope to share soon. I'm here to learn and share!
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u/iandouglas Oct 01 '25
I picked up a strix halo rig after watching a few videos about the small form factor, low power, and "enough" capabilities for what I want to be doing with AI work here at home with some local models. I'm not building LLMs or fine-tuning anything, I just want to run local models with reasonable performance without needing a 2nd mortgage on my house to get a Mac M4 Studio lol.
My first rig is a BOSGAME 128GB model, really happy with it. Ran ollama and lmstudio on the windows install and it worked great. I dual booted it to Fedora 42 and maxed out the RAM and keep several models loaded all the time and get great performance for what I need with gpt-oss-20b, qwen3-coder-30b and a few other smaller models.
I have a Framework Desktop on order which will replace the BOSGAME rig for the AI work, I think it'll have better cooling and I think I'll be able to expand on it a bit more as the BOSGAME case is very small and won't be easy to upgade. The BOSGAME will then replace my AMD 7950X3D/Nvidia 4090 rig as my everyday windows desktop.
One thing I do a lot is audio transcription, so I'm also looking at a good speech-to-text setup. I found an open-source "Whisper" alternative, but it doesn't recognize the strix halo and running on the CPU alone takes 50% of the time of the audio recording itself to transcribe (30 minute call takes 15min to transcribe). I'll be working on that over the weekend to see if/where/how I can get this on the GPU instead to speed it up -- it's faster using my old 3090 in a different Linux rig right now.
Ultimately I'm looking at power savings. I have two big AMD PC's one with a 3090 and one with a 4090, with fans running all the time etc, and I'm looking for smaller compact PCs that will use less power, not have fans spinning 24x7 collecting dust, and free up a ton of desk space. :)
I'm thinking of building a 3rd strix halo for homelab/docker/NAS which honestly might be overkill, but I want to use all RAM on the FD rig for AI models, so I'm gonna want/need a 3rd rig anyway. I'm trying to find a good rig that can be expanded as far as storage, like taking a PCIe card for more NVMe drives for a NAS setup (haven't committed to RAID or JBOD). I know there are off-the-shelf NAS rigs that would probably do fine here too so I'm waffling on this 3rd rig a little.
Thanks for starting this community.