[vlian2088]

it's 2026.07 and 128 GB of VRAM costs a firstborn.

[nightski]

The spark also has 128GB VRAM (same type) and by recently I mean I bought them last week for $3999 each.

[cyanydeez]

yeah, so $500 spread https://www.microcenter.com/product/699008/nvidia-dgx-spark is what the current price appears to be.

The differences are basically, sparks require ARM and sparks allow interconnects; so if you do have dreams of electric sheep to chain them together, you're not gonna get the AMD halo units.

But if you just want to putz around with a dev machine and do other things, not sure you'd want a spark.

[nightski]

They had it on sale last week for $3999, it will likely happen again. Also if you are willing to buy ASUS/Acer/MSI you can get them cheaper, in the same range as well. Those units are identical (mainboard/ram/chipset/connectivity), they only tend to differ in SSD being offered.

[verdverm]

The more beneficial difference between DGX and OEM Spark is in cooling. DGX has had cooling issue based on user reports.

[nightski]

Only Asus from what I have seen. Acer/Dell units seem to run cooler than the Nvidia unit, by a noticeable margin. That said I bought the OEM units for the Gen 5 4TB SSD and the fact that it was on sale.

[verdverm]

I have ASUS and no thermal issues, not sure if that is what you meant, ambiguity

[codedokode]

Please note that 8 x 16 Gb DDR4 modules cost $480, and have a bandwidth of 200 Gb/s, the only problem you need 8 DRAM controllers.

[nicce]

> the only problem you need 8 DRAM controllers.

Which is a huge problem? Even using 2x memory controllers in typical consumer motherboard can make system very unstable.

[codedokode]

Why is that so?

[jaxytee]

Running large MOE models won't saturate the EPYC memory.

You'll never see that 200 Gb/s running inference.

[edg5000]

Because it'll bottleneck at the CPU? Or because 200 bB/s is overkill when running a model (that fits in memory)?