alt Hacker NewsDoes anyone else feel like it would be great to be able to purchase $4000 AI box but 128 gigs is not enough. If I spend all that money and it doesn’t really do what I wanted to do, whats the point?
It’s kind of like general aviation where you can go buy a Cessna but it’s only going to realistically get you somewhere you could drive anyways but do you really wanna spend that mush cash to get road trip distance at slightly better than road trip speeds? You really need a 5 million dollar jet and that’s just not practical. That’s sort of how I feel about this device.
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I own one, I don’t feel like the RAM is a huge issue (of course I want 192GB to run something like DS4 Flash). The lack of FP4 and slow memory bandwidth is rough. NVFP4 support is such a huge advantage that I would recommend others to buy a DGX spark over a strix halo if you’re using it purely for AI. Strix halo works better for general computing.
I've got a Framework with 128GB. Sure, I'm probably not going to run Deepseek V4 flash (though, I could run the 2-bit quant). But there are a lot of models (especially MOE models) that run fine. Even Qwen3.5-122B in a 4 or 5 bit quant can run. The Qwen3-coder-next (~80B IIRC) runs fine (IIRC I'm running a 6-bit quant of that one). The much vaunted Qwen3.6-27B is runnable, but kind of slow (~20t/s with MTP), though that's not a memory limitation issue.
Yeah, It's be great to have 256GB RAM, but that's really expensive now anyway and there's no way I could get my wife to sign off on spending 5 grand (or more now) on a box with that much memory.
The Strix Halo is a great dev machine and a mediocre AI machine. You can run Qwen 3.6 27B at a decent speed, or larger MoE models, and that's about it. For some that's more than enough though, myself included.
Agreed, the Strix Halo doesn't feel good enough for $4k. It was supposed to be $2k (and was so until 6-12 months ago), which felt like a great deal. Not the best AI chip but you get what you pay for. A tinkerer's dream that could maybe even fit into a birthday gift budget for a lucky teenager. I hate to say it, but I hope they fail with their $4k box.
8 months ago you could get one of these for ~$2K. Well, not this exact item, but systems like the Framework Desktop with the same CPU and memory configuration.
It was a good deal for $2K. For $4K? I'm not so sure. Of course, most of the cost is RAM, so what can we do?