221–230 of 274 posts
These 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.
Ability to run any OS is a pretty nice benefit versus the spark.
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I've never seen appreciation in buying PCs. They were always like cars, once you drive them off the lot...
Well, GPUs sorta went up in the past 5 years.. but nothing like now.
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.
The one thing that's new/worth pointing out are the https://developer.amd.com/playbooks/ ( https://github.com/amd/playbooks ) - this is AMD's answer to Nvidia's playbooks ( https://build.nvidia.com/spark / 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 che…
it'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.
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…
Absolutely no reason that these need to be capped at 256 GB/s other than shortsighted design from three years ago.
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…
If you're not space-constrained, why go with a Framework Desktop? Just get a normal tower or a server rack computer.
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If you're not space-constrained, why go with a Framework Desktop? Just get a normal tower or a server rack computer.
One of the big benefits I’ve heard about for the framework, especially with the Noctua cooler, is that it’s virtually silent.
Well, almost. Maybe. Not all units. But probably.