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AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
- htrp 3mo agoDoes this have the same memory bandwidth problems as the spark?
- Schiendelman 3mo agoWhat's the Spark's memory bandwidth?
- jtbaker 3mo ago273 GB/s. Same ballpark as M4 Pro and Strix Halo.
- Schiendelman 3mo agoAh yeah, bummer. It's fine for building something that you know needs to run faster in the next generation.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- winterphoenix96 3mo agoYes. And the same not-enough-memory problems too
- kamranjon 3mo agoIn case it saves anyone some time (from the article): "The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395(Strix Halo) processor has been available since Spring 2025 and the Halo doesn’t offer anything new on that front." It has the same 256 GB/s memory bandwidth limit as every board previously, not sure why this is even being released right now as if it's some new fangled thing - you can go get a Framework Desktop for roughly the same price or a GMKtec EVO-X2 for a bit cheaper.
- ekholm_e 3mo agoThis. I bought Framework Desktop in November 2025 with almost these exact specs for ~$2.5k
- ahmadyan 3mo agoSame spec Framework costs $4k+ today, this is actually cheaper (albeit not as upgradable as framework).
- 827a 3mo agoFramework, weirdly, overcharges considerably for their SSDs. You can currently get a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB on Amazon for $390; Framework charges $625 for the Sandisk 850x 2TB, which has similar performance (and is being sold on Amazon for $530). If you DIY your own SSD, you can spec a Framework Desktop for below $4k; but not much below. Roughly the same price.
- hamdingers 3mo agoIf you can supply your own SSD, case, and 120mm fan the mainboard is "only" $3,149
- icedchai 3mo agoAnd it was "only" $1700 last year!
- cowmix 3mo agoI got the EVO-X2 for $1,599! In 44+ years of buying computers, I've seen some appreciation, but nothing like this. Going from $1,599 to ~$3,500 in a year is just insane.
- moffkalast 3mo ago128GB of the most in demand chip on the planet will do that to you.
- alexdns 3mo agoBosgame is $2799 does the same thing if you plan to run only 1 of them
- mhitza 3mo agoThe repeated claim that all these different forms are not directly comparable is a very strange aspect. Only thing that separates them is the build quality and the extra 20W of boost the framework desktop and this variant support. They have a note on the thermals but no measurement of noise. Doesn't matter if it's stricly a whoosh or a whine, only if they bother people in the same room. And the small ones like Bosgame get a consistent complaint about the noise in in-depth youtube videos.
- pettijohn 3mo ago$4k is pretty darn spendy. I recently purchased a refurbished Corsair AI Workstation with almost the same hardware (same chip, same 128GB RAM, but only 1TB storage) for $2160. Pretty good deal! Codex and I wrote a Linux driver to report the power mode of the device: https://github.com/pettijohn/corsair-ai-workstation-performance-level-linux https://github.com/pettijohn/corsair-ai-workstation-performa...
- glimshe 3mo agoHow much are we going to pay for "AI kits" once the DRAM shortage is over? Will we be able to run a local model equivalent to the current AI frontier in sub $1000 hardware, even if dedicated, in 5 years?
- moelf 3mo agofrontier to laptop runnable open weight so far seems to be ~2 years latency, so maybe there's some hope
- tracker1 3mo agoFor that matter, just getting Chinese DRAM into the market could cool pricing down a lot to oppose the cartel.
- wmf 3mo agoNo it won't because Chinese DRAM manufacturers have relatively low capacity and it's already being used. And in an auction, prices from different suppliers converge.
- tracker1 3mo agoBecause China can't ramp up production at all... no means to do so... they aren't even working on it at all.
- fennecbutt 3mo agoNot really. I imagine demand for AI just from China would eat up their entire production let alone demand from the west. And after all, that demand from consumers.
- url00 3mo agoYeeeeep. There is no moat at the moment. AI companies are trying to dig one as fast as they possibly can. Either through passing laws to prevent local inference ("It's too dangerous! We need to control it") or by creating/limiting possible integrations (locking down OS/hardware, APIs/MCPs that only work with Claude/ChatGPT, etc).
- robotswantdata 3mo agoWas “only” $2k in its previous form but even in this updated box the mem bandwidth is woefully inadequate. There’s a few models with space for a dedicated GPU for hybrid inference but imo not worth it. Save your money for a Xeon or EPYC build
- anticorporate 3mo ago[dead]
- syntaxing 3mo agoI have another strix halo that I got for half the price (before this price increase world wide). AMD making lemonade is one of the best reasons to get a strix halo. Lemonade + qwen3.6 35B MTP @ Q8_0 + anythingLLM (in docker) replaced 90%+ of my AI usage. And it’s fully local! Setting everything up took less than 3 hours total, including installing the OS https://lemonade-server.ai/ https://lemonade-server.ai/
- khurs 3mo agoAre the likes of Dell and Lenovo not going to be annoyed that AMD are cutting them out? As traditionally AMD was a supplier of parts.
- benoau 3mo agoDo they care that Microsoft is selling the Surface, or that Intel used to sell the NUC?
- khurs 3mo agoIntel = Fair as they sell both Intel and AMD so no loyalty on either side. Microsoft = yes, they care enormously, as Surface has taken away many sales. Albeit they sold some ChromeBooks
- tracker1 3mo agoBoth Dell and Lenovo have tended to favor Intel first... even more recently on business laptops.
- speed_spread 3mo agoDell is an Intel shop. They dgaf about AMD.
- khurs 3mo agoPretty sure they sell lots of EPYC servers
- lhl 3mo agoThe one thing that's new/worth pointing out are the https://developer.amd.com/playbooks/ https://developer.amd.com/playbooks/ (https://github.com/amd/playbooks https://github.com/amd/playbooks) - this is AMD's answer to Nvidia's playbooks (https://build.nvidia.com/spark https://build.nvidia.com/spark / https://github.com/NVIDIA/dgx-spark-playbooks https://github.com/NVIDIA/dgx-spark-playbooks ) - I think it's great that they're actually taking this more seriously. Hardware is the exact same as what used to be available for $2K last year (and is still $1K cheaper from Chinese OEMs). LTT Lab's LLM testing is getting more sophisticated, which is great - I think it's worth noting that ROCm/Vulkan versions and llama.cpp build versions are going to have some big differences for numbers. For those wanting to get the most out of their Strix Halos, there's both kernel tweaks and utilities like ryzenadj that can help you get the most out of it. ( http://strixhalo.wiki/ http://strixhalo.wiki/ has most of that documented). Also, if you're running for coding or agentic work, if you model supports MTP, that's mature and should give you a decent (30%?) decode boost.
- teravor 3mo agoit's worth noting that AMD's software is universally weak and not worth any degree of reliance. and it's not just ROCm, every few months they merge a serious regression into amdgpu and sometimes even backport it into stable. they are amateurs. just a few weeks ago they backported a kernel oops amdgpu null dereference into stable, it's still not fixed.
- icedchai 3mo agoThe "ROCm" situation with Strix Halo was pretty bad for a while. I think it finally stabilized late last year. You needed the right combo of ROCm, Linux kernel, and kernel firmware for it to work reliably. Whenever I rebuild llama.cpp, I wind up using the Vulkan build anyway.
- anakaine 3mo agoAnd thats a pretty big annoyance. You need to perfectly line up all the holes in the swiss cheese for the AMD stack to work, then their dev team kicks you in the nuts anyway. They have made a few attempts at investing in the hardware, but the software side is letting them down hard, and that part is almost entirely their own fault. They have underinvestment in their own stack, and into popular standard and Community libraries that would make it easy to use their gear.
- nightski 3mo agoI recently bought a few sparks from Micro Center for the exact same price and it comes with ConnectX-7 200Gbps inter-connectivity. Not sure how AMD feels it can charge exactly the same for less.
- vlian2088 3mo agoit's 2026.07 and 128 GB of VRAM costs a firstborn.
- nightski 3mo agoThe spark also has 128GB VRAM (same type) and by recently I mean I bought them last week for $3999 each.
- cyanydeez 3mo agoyeah, so $500 spread https://www.microcenter.com/product/699008/nvidia-dgx-spark https://www.microcenter.com/product/699008/nvidia-dgx-spark is what the current price appears to be. The differences are basically, sparks require ARM and sparks allow interconnects; so if you do have dreams of electric sheep to chain them together, you're not gonna get the AMD halo units. But if you just want to putz around with a dev machine and do other things, not sure you'd want a spark.
- nightski 3mo agoThey had it on sale last week for $3999, it will likely happen again. Also if you are willing to buy ASUS/Acer/MSI you can get them cheaper, in the same range as well. Those units are identical (mainboard/ram/chipset/connectivity), they only tend to differ in SSD being offered.
- verdverm 3mo agoThe more beneficial difference between DGX and OEM Spark is in cooling. DGX has had cooling issue based on user reports.
- Catloafdev 3mo agoThese devices were great when they were cheaper than the DGX Spark. But when they cost the same price (unless the Spark has shot up too), there's no reason to buy this over a Spark. The Spark is literally a faster version of this, with better software support. Edit: And I say that as an owner of a Ryzen AI Max 395 device.
- grubbs 3mo agoCheapest I've been able to get a DGX Spark FE is now around $4700 just FYI. This is from multiple vendors in higher-ed.
- Catloafdev 3mo agoAh ya then that's a bit of a gap. For anyone considering these devices, the only reason I would recommend against them is if you plan on getting multiple to link together - the DGX Spark has a much, much faster interconnect bandwidth ceiling than the AMD devices do. Otherwise, they're great!
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- frugalmail 3mo agoI'm looking at Amazon and I see $4k GB10 devices right now (not an affiliate link) https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Supercomputer-Superchip-Supports-Stackable/dp/B0G1MQYHRD https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Supercomputer-Superchip-Supports...
- ndom91 3mo agoWow the prices on these have really come up.. Got my Framework desktop mainboard (Just the motherboard + CPU + soldered 128gb RAM) in Dec 2025 for ~1900 EUR
- kccqzy 3mo agoIndeed December 2025 was the best time to buy.
- musha68k 3mo agoI had hoped this was about Medusa Halo, but unfortunately, it's about 2025 technology. It's the same as Framework Desktop was at the end of last summer, which would have been a slightly silly but fun buy at $2k... I'd hope Mark Cerny / Sony launch PS6 sooner rather than later, as together with the upcoming LPDDR6 standard, it should trickle down to us in the local LLM mud eventually?
- re-thc 3mo ago> I hope Mark Cerny launches his PS6 sooner rather than later With the current RAM and SSD prices... I rather a bit later.
- musha68k 3mo agoTrue, this is the new reality though. My main gripe with Strix Halo is memory bandwidth and compute performance. Gaming performance sits squarely in base PS5 territory just as is the case with Steam Machine AFAIR; yet due to economies of scale "cheap" 2020 era PS5 still has higher memory bandwidth by quite a bit last time I checked. PS6 "undertaker of physical media" will supposedly be priced >$1k: https://youtu.be/-F1JS-4Abjo https://youtu.be/-F1JS-4Abjo
- daft_pink 3mo agoIt would be really nice if they included clustering support like a blueprint on how to buy several of these and cluster them to run the really large models in the best way possible.
- aunty_helen 3mo ago256gbs memory bandwidth is about 1/4 that of a 3090. It would be a better buy with half the memory at 4x the speed.
- wolttam 3mo agoAre you sure about that? High memory speed is great for dense models, or when serving at high concurrency. However for local single-user setups, it's often better to have access to more capable/bigger MoE models at reasonable speeds and lower concurrences, which is enabled by these platforms.
- roadside_picnic 3mo agoIf you're using a MoE model, then why do you care about the larger RAM offered by these devices? That's the main problem with low bandwidth devices: they limit the effective ram you can make use. I do (and have historically done) quite a work with both local LLMs and local diffusion models. I have an M3 Max MBP at 400 GB/s and also a desktop with a RTX 4090 with 1,008 GB/s While the M3 Max MBP can serve up MoE reasonably fast (~60 token/sec)the RTX 4090 is an entirely different experience (~170 token/sec). I also do a fair bit of experimentation and am currently running a custom decoder that requires expensive look-ahead, but I'm still able to get a usable 25 token/s on the RTX. The raison d'etre for the DGX spark is not practical home inference, but rather offering the same fundamental architecture as data center cards for a affordable CUDA prototyping. If you want to build software to run on H100s, you probably can't justify buying (and running) a single card. The DGX spark solves this by having the same fundamental setup as what those cards have. That makes these non-NVIDIA DGX-like devices confusing to me. The entire benefit of the DGX series is the NVIDIA architecture itself. Anyone interested in home LLMs should decide whether a Mac or a dedicated GPU is the more sensible path based on their budget and other computer use. Each has their own benefits.
- wolttam 3mo agoI run DSv4 Flash at home on 2 DGX Sparks and am pretty sure there is no more cost effective way for me to do so. I'm not interested in running smaller models.
- PHr15 3mo agoEven a two-year-old Mac Studio outperforms this kit. A used unit with sufficient memory currently seems to offer the best price-to-performance ratio "The Apple Silicon Mac Studios outperform the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 machines"
- jeffbee 3mo agoA 2-year-old Mac Studio 128GB also sells for more.
- LabsLucas 3mo agoComically, the 512 GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio that we tested isn't even available for purchase any more. The highest you can purchase from Apple is 96 GB.
- Grombobulous 3mo agoI imagine there may be users who can’t use macOS, or maybe they want the ability to upgrade storage. The framework desktop even has a usable PCIe 4x slot available if you put the board in a different case. They sell the 128GB board on its own for $3150.
- bronson 3mo agoAnd how much can you buy a 128GB Mac Studio for now? Go look. I think you'll be shocked.
- ahmedehab_01 3mo agoWhy do all similar products have a hard limit on the 128 GB VRAM part? For that price, I hoped to get at least 224 GB VRAM
- croes 3mo agoBecause it’s a limit of the platform https://community.frame.work/t/was-there-no-possible-way-to-support-more-than-only-128gb-ram/65097 https://community.frame.work/t/was-there-no-possible-way-to-...
- jauntywundrkind 3mo agoFrom the replies, > A shame, really, as the Ryzen 7640U, 7840U, 7840HS, and 7940HS all support 256GB of RAM. To be fair, those platforms support dual dimms per channel, which Strix Halo would not, at least not at it's high speeds. But reciprocally Gorgon Halo 400 just launched and it supports... 192GB. And is the exact same APU. Memory chips did finally have their first big doubling per chip semi recently (available last February), with 48 & 64GB dimms becoming available. There is some reasonable lag here, that Strix Halo & Gorgon Halonuse lpddr5x, which perhaps had some lag, that 32GB (x4) was the best available. But now with Gorgon Halo being 192GB capable but not 256GB, it sure feels looks & seems like this is just bad spirited fuckery from AMD. https://forum.level1techs.com/t/where-are-the-ddr5-unbuffered-256gb-64gbx4-kits/210043/53 https://forum.level1techs.com/t/where-are-the-ddr5-unbuffere...
- wmf 3mo agoI assume they validated certain DRAM chips when the 395 first came out and they're just not going to validate any more. So newer DRAM is validated for the 495. We can't compare DDR5 and LPDDR5 since they are completely different; if 256 GB DDR5 is possible that doesn't mean anything.
- jauntywundrkind 3mo agoBut 192GB lpddr5x on Goron Halo 495 does strongly strongly suggest 256GB would be too. It took some big work to go from 32GB to 64GB dimms, was a long long long time coming. 48GB came latter. Its very unlikely that with 192GB Gorgon Halo that anything really blocks 256GB Gorgon Halo, or Strix Halo. Higher than 32GB chips are possible and exist.
- danielrmay 3mo agoPerhaps if less spending went towards their private aviation interests LTT labs could review a piece of hardware that was released _this_ year, or maybe extend their narrow testing process to cover real-world use metrics like TTFT. Not to mention the lack of real value-perf comparison to CUDA
- Mogzol 3mo agoThis hardware was just released this week? The CPU is from last year, but this dev kit is brand new.
- danielrmay 3mo agoCan you explain which benchmarking differences you'd expect to see from this hardware, considering?
- Mogzol 3mo agoNone evidently. Why does that matter? I was just pointing out that this hardware was released _this_ year.
- fc417fc802 3mo agoCan you articulate which new hardware you would have preferred them to look at and why?
- Tenoke 3mo agoI really want a 128gb+ machine but it's brutal to be at only 256 GB/s for $4k (especially with the drawbacks of both ARM and AMD). I fear that by the time the RTX Spark comes out it'd have to be $6k, and by the time a 128gb or more machine with 700+ GB/s comes out it'd be at $10k, way out of most consumers' hands. Edit: capitalized gb/s to GB/s.
- Neywiny 3mo agoTo be clear though that's GB/s. Which is 2 terabits/sec
- dabinat 3mo agoA Mac Studio is a much better buy in terms of memory bandwidth, but impossible to buy in a 128 GB configuration. Honestly there aren’t great options right now and it’s probably better to wait for the market to be less insane.
- Tenoke 3mo agoI looked for one and it's impossible to find, let alone at a reasonable price + it does suffer from being harder to train/use less common models and workflows (e.g. arbitrary comfyui ones). Spark at least doesnt have that drawback, while AMD has both drawbacks. Waiting for the market to be less insane is somewhat akin to waiting for the s&p500 to drop a decent amount so you can buy in.
- 3mo ago
- cat_plus_plus 3mo agoDrastically slower than Macs and NVIDIA unified memory boxes while not being any cheaper.
- woodrowbarlow 3mo agoi wish there was a system like strix halo, but with enough lanes for a dedicated PCIe 5.0 x16 slot so you can have the best of both worlds: large sparse models on CPU with unified memory, dense models on GPU with real tensors and higher bandwidth memory.
- snarfy 3mo agoI want to play with openclaw for continuous workflows without burning my cloud credits. Do I want this?
- jdiaz97 3mo agono, you openclaw is too vibecoded, use Hermes
- codedokode 3mo ago32 Gb DDR4 RAM module has a bandwidth of 25 Gb/s and costs $160. If you buy 8 of these, you get 256 Gb RAM with 200 Gb/s bandwidth at $1280. And if you buy 16 x 16 Gb modules (each at $60) then you can get 400 Gb/s of bandwidth for $960. The only problem, you need 8 or 16 memory controllers. Memory controllers are not that expensive: Intel Core i3-14100F has 2 channel controller and costs $110, so we can estimate that 16-channel controller should cost not more than $880, and 8-channel controller should cost $440. So isn't it better to make a cheap CPU with 16 DRAM controllers instead of this $4K gear having only 128 Gb? Or maybe 2 CPUs each having 8 RAM channels? DDR5 costs 2 times more ($360 for 32 Gb) while not even having 2 times the bandwidth so it is not worth buying. It is more reasonable to make more RAM channels and stuff them with DDR4.
- codedokode 3mo agoSo what I am trying to say, industry took a wrong turn. Instead of moving to over-priced DDR5, they should just make even cheapest CPUs support 8/16 DDR4 channels. Because a 32Gb DDR5-4800 module costs $360, and two 32Gb DDR4-3200 modules cost $320, so you get twice more size, more bandwidth and it costs you less. DDR5 is just a rip off.
- bradfa 3mo agoEach memory controller interface is a not-insignificant number of PCB traces. Increasing the number of memory controllers may dramatically increase the number of PCB layers (or may not, it really depends on the CPU pinout) but it definitely will increase the number of pins on the CPU socket. This is one of the main reasons (the other is the number of PCIe lanes) why high end desktop and server CPUs have like double the number of pins and so much bigger sockets as compared to consumer desktop CPUs.
- codedokode 3mo agoThen what's about using 4-8 cheapest motherboards with 64Gb DDR4 and a cheap CPU, and connecting them via PCIE x16 sockets? And as for DRAM channels, typical cheap motherboard has 2 channels and 4 slots, it should not be super difficult to add 2 more channels.
- paxys 3mo agoI was considering getting an AI Max+ machine last year when the price was around $2K. Crazy to see the same specs now going for double the price.
- mikelitoris 3mo agoI love(!) how these dev!kits are for devs in silicon valley making 300k+ a year and not any other dev in any other part of the world. Satire if you can’t tell…
- devld 3mo ago15 square cm box? Wow. Are there similar size, but less powered (and cheaper) workstations? I need a box that can build chromium reasonably fast and I would rather have something portable like this than a PC tower, but this is an overkill at $4k.
- wmf 3mo agoLook at Minisforum; they have a bunch of different models.
- phkahler 3mo ago>> Are there similar size, but less powered (and cheaper) workstations? I designed this: https://github.com/phkahler/mellori_ITX https://github.com/phkahler/mellori_ITX It's 195 x 190 x 60mm and takes a standard ITX board. You'll need to relocate the hole for the fan depending on your motherboard, but CAD files are available and you only need to change 2 parameters (X,Y of the hole center). BTW mine was upgraded to 64GB RAM and a 5700G (zen 3 APU) but it died and I'm still trying to bring up a newer board - still socket AM4. BTW to get the center coordinates of the hole, measure from the edges of the board to the top and bottom of the metal plate under the CPU socket and take their average distance. That plate is symmetric and centered under the hole.
- dwroberts 3mo agoSeems not really worth it? About the same cost as DGX, same amount of memory and yet the bandwidth is actually slightly lower. And also the DGX is CUDA being an Nvidia device which is a big compatibility advantage For this to be compelling it would need to be eg 256GB minimum or something
- Scroll_Swe 3mo agoSo... I dont want to ruin gaming more but why not get a gaming PC? Figured this out 15 years ago if its good for gaming, put some more RAM in and boom you have a workstation...
- frugalmail 3mo agoThe biggest problem is that if you want to run large (continuous memory) models, gaming graphics cards aren't sufficient, and if you manage to get graphics cards that you can chain it becomes a lot more expensive (and better performance) than these machines and GB10 machines.
- Grombobulous 3mo agoThe shortcoming is the memory speed/bandwisth. With a desktop your system memory is slow and your fast graphics memory is limited in size. To me it seems like the best bang for your buck in the BYO desktop PC space is to get a board with dual PCIe slots then find some old generation 24GB GPUs like RTX 3090. But you’re not getting access to more than 48GB of fast memory without something similar to this or a Mac Studio.
- Scroll_Swe 3mo agoInteresting thank you, almost reminds me of a PS2 then, super fast memory but not very good "traditional" GPU
- frugalmail 3mo agoWhen this was half the price of the DGX Spark, it made sense. But same price is a ridiculous premium for inferior performance but the ability to run Windows.
- m0llusk 3mo agoSeems like having a big and clunky external power supply enables a smaller profile for the rest of the unit while making installation a bit more complex. How exactly is this thing going to be installed for use? Wouldn't it be easier to just have a bigger box with more shielding and heat dissipation?
- wmf 3mo agoExternal power supplies make UL certification cheaper; that's the reason. I hate power bricks but I have so many on my desk that one more makes no difference. The Beelink version has an internal PSU BTW.
- zuzululu 3mo agowhat can you realistically do with this ? $4k is a lot of money to spend on something like this without really being sure what models can reliably run
- azinman2 3mo agoThe Mac beats it in all benchmarks, is probably more energy efficient, can add more ram, and is more cost efficient (?)… plus you get a Mac. This doesn’t even give you cuda. I’m not sure who this is for.
- __rito__ 3mo agoI was in Gray Scott School for HPC last week, and even in scientific usage, CPU-only cases, AMD is still a pain point. Many tools and libraries don't have first class AMD support or any support at all. It loses to Intel in CPU, and NVIDIA in GPU, in case of scientific libraries and HPC-worthy libs, tools. I think people who want an "AI Dev Kit" will lean towards Intel + NVIDIA setup. I am not a fan of Intel, but their MKL, MPI, etc. are not paralleled. Same goes for CUDA with NVIDIA.
- c7b 3mo agoThis is just a little under the price of NVidia's DGX Spark with CUDA or a Mac with 128GB and twice the memory bandwidth. The point of Strix Halo used to be that it was half the price of those way more capable machines. You'd be crazy to buy the AMD chip at this price. But the hardware market is generally crazy right now, so I'm sure this will sell as well, unfortunately.
- xandrius 3mo agoPersonally, I'm totally ok to have a competitor to Nvidia, regardless of whether they are under the price or not.
- c7b 3mo agoBut ideally they would be competitive, right? If your goal is LLM or Diffusion inference or - god forbid - training, you're going to get way better performance on DGX Spark. The difference is more stark than 250 vs 273 GB/s bandwidth delta would suggest. Now I think it's totally fine to have a less capable offering, and the Strix Halo is still a mighty capable machine for inference on mid-size MoEs. At 2k it was a tinkerer's dream. But the performance difference should be reflected in the price. This is roughly a doubling of the price compared to less than a year ago without adding any notable features, it's appalling.
- p1esk 3mo agowhere do you see "twice the memory bandwidth"?
- ahmadyan 3mo agoHe is making things up. It is the same bandwidth as DGX Spark (256 GB/s vs 273 GB/s) and far behind M3 Ultra (~819 GB/s)
- c7b 3mo agoYou're the one making things up. An M3 Ultra with 128GB RAM doesn't exist, the M3 Max has 410GB/s bandwidth [0]. I was of course talking about the M4 Max with 546GB/s, which was closer to twice the price of a Strix Halo mini PC in a typical configuration when it was still available. And memory bandwidth isn't everything, NVidia's lead in software is substantial, look up any tests comparing them side-by-side. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M3 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M4
- ManlyBread 3mo agowow only $4k for an unupgradeable computer that will never be able to run anything that uses CUDA
- SwellJoe 3mo agoI have a Strix Halo device, and like it, but at this price, might as well buy the Nvidia-based ASUS GX 10, if you're buying it for AI. CUDA remains the stronger ecosystem. The AMD is a better desktop machine, as it has a better CPU, but the Nvidia will be a little faster and a little better supported for inference and training workloads. You can almost always do the same things with ROCm, but you're going to work a little more. Though, I will say that Nvidia ships a dogshit custom Ubuntu on their hardware that's hard to deal with. Nvidia is not good at software. I keep thinking they'll get better at it, but I've been dealing with their Jetson line for a couple of years now, and it still sucks. Still a clumsy custom Ubuntu, and it's not as easy as simply installing a different Linux version as it's a complicated image-based thing and no UEFI. At least, I assume they ship Ubuntu on the big devices; I've only dealt with the little embedded Jetson machines. The AMD stuff, being a regular x86_64 PC, you can install pretty much any Linux. I immediately put Fedora on mine.
- cmrdporcupine 3mo agoI ... don't find the Ubuntu on my Spark to be dogshit? It's ... fine? It's just Ubuntu. Hasn't given me any grief and it's so far the only vendor I've seen that actually ships a properly supported Linux on an ARM64 device for Linux, so there's that. I use my ASUS GX10 as my daily driver, my primary workstation. Only thing that doesn't work for me on it is Spotify (probably some DRM thing). Oh, and there's no Signal ARM64 client, it seems. The big advantage of the DGX Spark over the Strix Halo is much faster prefill. Like 5x the speed. Also the networking hardware on it is insanely powerful, though I and 99% of other Spark users, are unlikely to use it to its full capacity.
- SwellJoe 3mo agoThe unusual bootloader and custom hardware makes modifying and upgrading the OS a challenge. I work on robots that need a custom OS image loaded on the machine. The Nvidia Ubuntu version makes that a huge pain in the ass. They've got binary-only drivers that have to be there, the install/upgrade process is finicky and prone to failure (always recoverable, so far, but all the techs in production I work with have a hard time with it and have to be walked through it, as it's just so alien to folks who work with regular PCs most of the time). Let's just say if I had my druthers, I would not choose Ubuntu, and I really wouldn't choose the Nvidia/ARM spin of Ubuntu. The Strix Halo has the benefit of being entirely a normal x86_64 PC that happens to also have a big chunk of unified memory. You can put pretty much anything on it. Any Linux, regular Windows, probably even a BSD (though good luck getting AI stuff working there). But, as I said, if you're spending $4000 exclusively for inference and AI workloads, you might as well get the Nvidia-based unit. It is better for that.
- onraglanroad 3mo agoI think I might be tempted to wait for the Butlerian market crash and pick up stuff from the firesale. Depends how long this market can remain utterly loony though.
- Rzor 3mo ago>Depends how long this market can remain utterly loony though. Probably way, way longer than we'd ideally like. Every now and then, you hear that this is the new normal, that it'll last until 2032 or something, and I can practically smell the paid advertising or cult-like messaging behind attempts to destroy any speck of hope consumers have so they'll just pay the toll. But man, it really could be exactly that. There's just too much money to be made for all the involved parties.
- fc417fc802 3mo ago> There's just too much money to be made for all the involved parties. Even setting that aside, depending on the pace of datacenter buildout even a round of new fab capacity coming online might not be enough to bring prices down. I think there's a decent chance we have to wait for investors to get tired of building new datacenters which could easily be 5+ years.
- Havoc 3mo agoTough sell. High price, uncompetitive mem throughput
- saaskitdev 3mo ago[flagged]
- atlgator 3mo agoAnother Framework Desktop clone.
- anonym29 3mo agoI got a Beelink GTR 9 Pro for $1980. These Strix Halo systems were a good deal at $2k when the alternative was a DGX Spark (which is similarly memory-constrained, but has about twice the iGPU processing power of the Radeon 8060S, having as many CUDA cores as an RTX 5070) for $4k. The pitch was basically "half the GPU compute (negative), x86 instead of ARM (positive), but no CUDA (negative), for half the price (positive), but you also don't get the ConnectX-7 NIC (negative)". These more or less balanced out to being worth it if you wanted a single-node system that could also double as a generic x86 homelab server once it was obsolete for LLM workloads. These days, you can get a DGX Spark for $4.7k, so yes, the price has risen, but Strix Halo (with a few exceptions like the Bosgame and Corsair systems) $4k (or more!) is simply not a very good deal. If I were buying new right now, I'd 100% go DGX Spark without even thinking about it. Gorgon Halo (releasing this fall/winter) is allegedly coming with 3GB memory chips, enabling a 192GB maximum unified memory SKU, alongside minor (100MHz) clock bumps in the iGPU and CPU, plus memory bumping from 8000 MT/s to 8533 MT/s (matching the MBW of the DGX Spark), and is otherwise unchanged. I fear these will be $5000+. At $3000, these would be awesome. At $5000, not so much.
- watchdarkly 3mo agoOk, but can it run crysis?
- tarpitt 3mo agoThis site is pretty awesome
- chazeon 3mo agoWhy does this lab test only have marketing materials? They are not even installing linux on a supposedly LLM dev machine
- fennecbutt 3mo agoEww, LTT.
- hokkos 3mo agoPeople complain about the cost of RAM for data centers, yet happily buy devices with 128 GB of RAM that will see an order of magnitude less use than servers in those same data centers.
- ycui1986 3mo agoi always thought Ryzen AI Halo, together with DGS Spark, has mismatched compute capacity with memory size. Given 128GB VRAM, people would want to run large models, but the GPU compute is constraint in these types of use case. If the box runs models that don't need high compute, then there is no need of 128GB VRAM. On the high end side, it is too slow. On the low end size, it waste money on VRAM.
- mortoc 3mo agoI bought one of this system back when you could get one for $1800 (the GMKTek Ryzen AI Halo 128gb machine). It's a very good dev machine, the 16 core CPU is quite good for development work. I find this is a useful configuration for local LLMs with plenty of RAM left over for doing actual work on the system (split something like 64 system, 64 dedicated to LLMs). I don't think I'd pay $4k for it today though, 2 years ago and less than half the price feels like a good machine. I'd be very disappointed in it today for $4k.
- drnick1 3mo agoIs this really worth $4000? I'd be curious how it compares to a couple of used 3090s in terms of the models it can run and inference speed.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Alien1Being 3mo agoNice, but I understand that ROCm, the software part is terrible.
- rldjbpin 3mo agothis product really deserves the "halo" in the name. very difficult to gauge its fit in the current market. if you want inference, go mac with much higher memory bandwidth. given the price premium here, or the little there is, you might as well. if you want to finetune and experiment, cuda still has the moat and the kit is not much cheaper, if at all, than dgx spark. from personal experience, i had access to amd developer cloud with a fair bit of credits. however, even doing inference outside of their supported use cases (which are often dated btw) using vllm was a pain. in the end, despite great computing potential on paper, i decided to not spend more time than its worth on it. if their enterprise cloud continue to have these grievances, i am not optimistic about this kit. it might be down to skill issue on my end. perhaps if these sell and it gives amd enough motivation to add more software staff in-house, more power to them. otherwise, good article from labs as usual. nice to know that other kits based on this soc are more or less the same (unsurprisingly).
- znpy 3mo agoAnybody knows when will it be possible to buy the newer 192gb part?
- nottorp 3mo agoLet me guess, the power brick is twice as large as the actual machine and it sounds like a vacuum cleaner because the fans are way too small. So it's usable only in data center conditions but then why make it in this form factor?
- devld 3mo agoHow well can it run GLM 5.2?
- dango369 3mo agothis reminds me of 'the box' from silicon valley show why is everything a BOX ????????? why not some other platonic solid
- deeddy 3mo agoHow come the same hardware that was $2000 is now packed under a different name and costs double - $4000?! It's literally the same PC that was twice as cheaper 6 months ago.
- verdverm 3mo agodemand >>> supply
- NarimanLabs 3mo agoI seriously wonder how this is going to disrupt the market. At this rate, a new semiconductor, GPU, CPU is releasing every quarter.
- bitbasher 3mo agoWhy buy this over a framework desktop?
- tokamak 3mo agoNo practical reasons. Just cool looks.
- pbgcp2026 3mo agoThe $4K is awful lot of heavy API use.