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Comments (24)
- kristianpI know it's just a quick test, but llama 3.1 is getting a bit old. I would have liked to see a newer model that can fit, such as gpt-oss-120, (gpt-oss-120b-mxfp4.gguf), which is about 60gb of weights (1).(1) https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/15396
- jasoneckertI've got the Dell version of the DGX Spark as well, and was very impressed with the build quality overall. Like Jeff Geerling noted, the fans are super quiet. And since I don't keep it powered on continuously and mainly connect to it remotely, the LED is a nice quick check for power.But the nicest addition Dell made in my opinion is the retro 90's UNIX workstation-style wallpaper: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/grace-blackwell/
- TepixYou can get two Strix Halo PCs with similar specs for that $4000 price. I just hope that prompt preprocessing speeds will continue to improve, because Strix Halo is still quite slow in that regard.Then there is the networking. While Strix Halo systems come with two USB4 40Gbit/s ports, it's difficult toa) connect more than 3 machines with two ports eachb) get more than 23GBit/s or so per connection, if you're lucky. Latency will also be in the 0.2ms range, which leaves room for improvement.Something like Apple's RDMA via Thunderbolt would be great to have on Strix Halo…
- aleccoIMHO DGX Spark at $4,000 is a bad deal with only 273 GB/s bandwidth and the compute capacity between a 5070 and a 5070 TI. And with PCIe 5.0 at 64 GB/s it's not such a big difference.And the 2x 200 GBit/s QSFP... why would you stack a bunch of these? Does anybody actually use them in day-to-day work/research?I liked the idea until the final specs came out.
- npalliSeems you are paying the Dell tax of 15%. The same setup is $4K from NVidia, Lenovo and $3K for 1TB at Asus.https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/dell-pro-m...
- barelysapientGreat article but would be nice to see how larger models work.
- cat_plus_plusI have a slightly cheaper similar box, NVIDIA Thor Dev Kit. The point is exactly to avoid deploying code to servers that cost half a million dollars each. It's quite capable in running or training smart LLMs like Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct-NVFP4. So long as you don't tear your hair out first figuring out pecularities and fighting with bleeding edge nightly vLLM builds.
- kachapopopowDell fixing issues instead of creating new ones? That's a new one for me. Would rather still not deal with their firmware updaters thought.
- dagaciA nice little AI review with comparison of the CPU/Power Draw & Networking would be interested in seeing a fine-tuning comparison too. I think pricing was missing also.
- colordropsI assume they didn't fix the memory bandwidth pain point though.