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I 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
by nightski 3mo ago
I 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.
- nightski 3mo agoOnly Asus from what I have seen. Acer/Dell units seem to run cooler than the Nvidia unit, by a noticeable margin. That said I bought the OEM units for the Gen 5 4TB SSD and the fact that it was on sale.
- verdverm 3mo agoI have ASUS and no thermal issues, not sure if that is what you meant, ambiguity
- cmrdporcupine 3mo agoSame here, no issue at all with my ASUS Spark-thing. And back when I was selecting this, I watched a whole video that broke them all down by thermal mgmt and there wasn't anything wrong with the ASUS. I do wish didn't buy the one that only had the 1TB nVME in it though. It's one of those expensive half-sized dealies, which makes upgrading expensive. Esp now.
- verdverm 3mo agoI bought the 1T and then did it again. I don't see the need for more sad on a vllm server, I have dozens of models and quant in that space. If I need more for data, I intend to plug in an old 4T HDD
- codedokode 3mo agoPlease note that 8 x 16 Gb DDR4 modules cost $480, and have a bandwidth of 200 Gb/s, the only problem you need 8 DRAM controllers.
- nicce 3mo ago> the only problem you need 8 DRAM controllers. Which is a huge problem? Even using 2x memory controllers in typical consumer motherboard can make system very unstable.
- codedokode 3mo agoWhy is that so?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jaxytee 3mo agoRunning large MOE models won't saturate the EPYC memory. You'll never see that 200 Gb/s running inference.
- edg5000 3mo agoBecause it'll bottleneck at the CPU? Or because 200 bB/s is overkill when running a model (that fits in memory)?