111–120 of 274 posts
This 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.
So... 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...
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.
This 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.
Even 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"
$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-performa...
Is that price still available?
This 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.
where do you see "twice the memory bandwidth"?
i 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.
Plus a reasonably inexpensive super low-latency interconnect.
This 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.
Personally, I'm totally ok to have a competitor to Nvidia, regardless of whether they are under the price or not.
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.
In 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…
This. I bought Framework Desktop in November 2025 with almost these exact specs for ~$2.5k