The device was not perfect by any means, but the ability to run fairly large models is some kind of magic.
It's not even worth it at that point.
You can get a used enterprise grade SXM baseboard with 4-8 V100/A100 GPUs off eBay at a similar price. That will even get you actual HMB ram and NVlink. Along with 10x the AI performance, assuming you don't care about your electricity bill of course.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/157742745616
It's always a gamble buying used electric but per the description, fully decked out server with 256gb vram.
Though at 2U it is going to sound like a 747 taking off from your office.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/336632412718
Buy one and let me use it when you're sleeping.
You'd need at least threadripper cpu/motherboard to handle that many pcie slots/lanes.
Not to mention that a baseboard like that is not going to work with a standard ATX power supply, so you'd have to provide your own power solution.
If that doesn't sound fun to you, you're probably better off buying Claude tokens.
It isn't a problem for me, more amusing than anything else (I run in Low Power mode 90% of the time) but worth knowing for anyone thats thinking about pushing the hardware to its limit 24/7.
The cheapest 128GB Macbook Pro here costs €7.949,00.
No doubt a better value than the HP, and will depreciate a lot less quickly, but just as expensive. Unfortunately, not being able to run Linux is a breaking point for me.
I've played with ds4 on such a machine, and the battery drains when using only a 96W power brick. But you can put it in low power mode and the fans won't even turn on while it delivers something like a third of the performance.
I didn't get a Strix Halo laptop because it was the best bang per buck, I got it because it was an awesome machine that could do a little bit of everything, fit in a backpack and only needed 140W.
But noone should buy one at 7899, obviously. It was a tough sell for me at the old 2800 pricing.
I wanted a laptop that could run some medium sized LLMs locally and experiment with. Strix Halo is great for that. But it was also 2800 euros for a 128GB premium laptop. Not 7899 like it is now.
Shame it broke out of warranty.