A 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.

Yeah, folks should be aware that if you're filling up the memory on a Strix Halo for an inference workload, you're going to be getting uncomfortably slow token rates. Like, DS4 (a 1-bit quantization of DeepSeek V4 Flash) runs at something like 9-13 tokens/second, with a loooong time to first token. It is not a realistic interactive coding model for agentic use.

I like my Strix Halo and keep it chewing on stuff, mostly non-interactive workloads (security audits of software mostly, training experiments, etc.), I get a lot of use out of it. If you want to experiment with AI, it is a good platform for that, though at $4k you can get an Nvidia-based Asus Ascend GX10, which is probably better. But, if you want a local model for interactive agentic use, you're going to be running either Qwen 3.6 or Gemma 4, which will fit comfortably on 2x64GB GPUs (even old GPUs will run them faster than the Strix Halo...I have dual Radeon Pro V620s which are faster, and they're six years old), or snugly on 32GB. A 48GB or 64GB Mac would run them well. Two Radeon AI Pro R9700 GPUs is probably the sweet spot, right now for GPUs. Not the cost of a good used car, like a 5090 or 4090, but plenty of memory and performance for local inference. Also, not finicky and weird and needing custom 3D printed fan shrouds like the old server GPUs on eBay.

At the moment, there just isn't a model that works better on a 128GB inference machine like this that don't also work fine on 64GB machines, which may be faster (very few 32GB GPUs will be slower, though I wouldn't recommend buying any GPU that isn't currently actively supported by the vendor drivers and CUDA or ROCm...so probably don't buy an MI50 or V100 or whatever).

To be clear though that's GB/s. Which is 2 terabits/sec

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