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Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver

daniel.lawrence.lu

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Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver

#41

Post by colordrops »

willis936 wrote: post #6
cogman10 wrote: post #4

I strongly considered it, but the one thing that scares me away from wanting to do the spark is you basically have to use nvidia's linux (from what I've read) and it doesn't appear the nvidia is interested in upstreaming their kernel changes. I'm avoiding where possible buying electronics where support is controlled by the manufacturer and not me.

A good instinct. There are a lot of things a $500 AMD GPU can do in linux that a $5000 DGX cannot.

Fair. Honest caveat - I keep seeing "a good instinct" everywhere now. Is this humans acquiring new phrases from Claude? Is there a name for this phenomenon yet?

Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver

#42

Post by dllu »

ciupicri wrote: post #39

Somehow related: "The end of my AArch64 [Ampere Altra Q80-30] desktop experiment", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48728599 / https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2026/06/26/the-end-of-the-...

The Ampere cpu in that post has a "lack of single core CPU speed" despite ripping through compilation tasks with its 80 cores. But the DGX Spark's CPU has fairly decent single core speed and is more like Apple Silicon in this respect.

Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver

#43

Post by knollimar »

colordrops wrote: post #41
willis936 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good instinct. There are a lot of things a $500 AMD GPU can do in linux that a $5000 DGX cannot.

Fair. Honest caveat - I keep seeing "a good instinct" everywhere now. Is this humans acquiring new phrases from Claude? Is there a name for this phenomenon yet?

If not I propose HLRF.

Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver

#45

Post by ciupicri »

kingstnap wrote: post #37
nightski wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's simple, the 395+ Max Strix Halo you bought for $1800 is now a ~$4000 build (at least the AMD AI dev unit). If only we had time travel right? Either way, the Nvidia unit comes with Connect-X 7. That may or may not matter to you, but the hardware for that isn't cheap. In general the Nvidia cards also have better support for models. I know AMD is trying to catch up but anything except their datacenter cards do not…

AMD is barely trying. The 395+ Max Strix Halo was launched January 2025. gfx1151 was not listed in the ROCm compatibility matrix for ROCm 7.2.4 [0]. This is the previous version of ROCm. It's only finally received support in ROCm 7.14.0 [1]! It literally just started receiving support last week. [0] https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/docs-7.2.4/compatibility/compat... [1] https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/docs-7.14.0/compatibil…

Is it to me or the iGPU of Ryzen 9950X is not supported by ROCm?

Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver

#46

Post by pizza234 »

biddit wrote: post #33

Please don’t buy a DGX Spark unless all three of these are true: - You value simplicity more than performance or price-to-performance. - You accept that the hardware will depreciate rapidly. - You’re prepared to buy two or four of them. OR: - You want to run frontier models right now as cheaply as possible - You want to run high-parameter models on a 15a breaker/line Otherwise, get a normal, high-bandwidth GPU. A sin…

I'm actually confused by the post - indeed why choosing the 27B dense and the 35B MoE models? Given the structure of the post I honestly have the impression that the Spark was purchased out of curiosity more than for a specific purpose (LLMs).

Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver

#49

Post by gerdesj »

biddit wrote: post #33

Please don’t buy a DGX Spark unless all three of these are true: - You value simplicity more than performance or price-to-performance. - You accept that the hardware will depreciate rapidly. - You’re prepared to buy two or four of them. OR: - You want to run frontier models right now as cheaply as possible - You want to run high-parameter models on a 15a breaker/line Otherwise, get a normal, high-bandwidth GPU. A sin…

Actually, its ~119GB usable (I have one). You can shutdown a lot of unneeded services if you only use it remote which will trim a lot more fat. You can enable the RDP service if you don't want to sit in front of it but get a desktop interface.

The "shitty" network is 10Gb/s and wifi7! You get a twin QSFP28DDlol+++ (I jest) that each run at 200Gb/s - not for the casual home user but handy at work, although I "only" have 40Gb/s on my switches sigh. With and no switch two you can do a three node cluster with some careful networking. If you want to do more then a switch is needed and it will need to be pretty funky! That said you could wire them up in a circle and use VLANs and MSTP and accept less than 200Gb/s per link. You'll probably need Openvswitch and a lie down afterwards.

I'm not a fan of the Gnome desktop but it works well enough and I think the Nvidia customised Ubuntu is well thought out. You get all the complicated NVidia extras pre-installed, along with docker (full fat, not the Ubuntu one) for a fairly quick start. It includes Ubuntu Pro which is free for five systems anyway but its nice to see it pre-installed.

You can run quite decent models on this thing see: https://spark-arena.com/ Also see "DS4".

We blew abut £4000 on one and it will pay for itself in a few months. I tried pricing up an Apple thingie and the Store wouldn't offer me more than 96Gb of RAM and a delivery date in Q3 at the earliest. Our Spark rocked up next day. They seem to come in 1TB or 4TB SSD variants. 1TB is enough for me and saves a lot of cash - keep an eye on your model downloads and ruthlessly delete old experiments. docker system prune.

We went for the Asus variant that has active cooling and I stuck it in the ceiling cable tray over our computer room racks. It sits on 1½" stainless steel mesh with lots of clearance in an actively cooled environment.

Re: Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver

#50

Post by josh-wrale »

biddit wrote: post #33

Please don’t buy a DGX Spark unless all three of these are true: - You value simplicity more than performance or price-to-performance. - You accept that the hardware will depreciate rapidly. - You’re prepared to buy two or four of them. OR: - You want to run frontier models right now as cheaply as possible - You want to run high-parameter models on a 15a breaker/line Otherwise, get a normal, high-bandwidth GPU. A sin…

I agree with this. I have a dual rtx4090 machine, a 128gb m5 max mbp, and a dgx spark. RedHatAI/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-FP8-dynamic on the dual rtx4090 machine under vLLM absolutely slays at token speed. I'm frustrated with how hard it is to realize goodness on the dgx spark.
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