Hacker News Reader

Comment by daft_pink | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else feel like it would be great to be able to purchase $4000 AI box but 128 gigs is not enough. If I spend all that money and it doesn’t really do what I wanted to do, whats the point?

It’s kind of like general aviation where you can go buy a Cessna but it’s only going to realistically get you somewhere you could drive anyways but do you really wanna spend that mush cash to get road trip distance at slightly better than road trip speeds? You really need a 5 million dollar jet and that’s just not practical. That’s sort of how I feel about this device.

View on HN

I've got a Framework with 128GB. Sure, I'm probably not going to run Deepseek V4 flash (though, I could run the 2-bit quant). But there are a lot of models (especially MOE models) that run fine. Even Qwen3.5-122B in a 4 or 5 bit quant can run. The Qwen3-coder-next (~80B IIRC) runs fine (IIRC I'm running a 6-bit quant of that one). The much vaunted Qwen3.6-27B is runnable, but kind of slow (~20t/s with MTP), though that's not a memory limitation issue.

Yeah, It's be great to have 256GB RAM, but that's really expensive now anyway and there's no way I could get my wife to sign off on spending 5 grand (or more now) on a box with that much memory.

I own one, I don’t feel like the RAM is a huge issue (of course I want 192GB to run something like DS4 Flash). The lack of FP4 and slow memory bandwidth is rough. NVFP4 support is such a huge advantage that I would recommend others to buy a DGX spark over a strix halo if you’re using it purely for AI. Strix halo works better for general computing.

There's a glimmer of hope with ROCmFP4 which seems to double the current throughput: https://github.com/charlie12345/rocmfp4-llama

I saw that but end of the day, the chips themselves don’t have hardware support for FP4. There’s smart ways around this limitation but it will never natively be close to true FP4 performance like MXFP4 and NVFP4 (happy to be proven wrong though).

Heads up, you can absolutely run DS4 Flash on a 128gb machine - I have it running on my Strix Halo box right now.

https://github.com/antirez/ds4

How has it been and how’s the speed? I read online that the it’s ~200 TPS for PP and ~15 TPS for TG. Unfortunately for those speeds, it’s very very hard to use for agentic stuff.

That's pretty accurate to what I've seen, I'd definitely recommend a smaller model for active agentic use on that hardware.

It definitely seems to be the leader on 'general intelligence' on this hardware from my casual usage, but the newer Qwen or Gemma series models are much more usable speed-wise for agentic use, and often is as good or better than DS4 on that front.

8 months ago you could get one of these for ~$2K. Well, not this exact item, but systems like the Framework Desktop with the same CPU and memory configuration.

It was a good deal for $2K. For $4K? I'm not so sure. Of course, most of the cost is RAM, so what can we do?

The Strix Halo is a great dev machine and a mediocre AI machine. You can run Qwen 3.6 27B at a decent speed, or larger MoE models, and that's about it. For some that's more than enough though, myself included.

Agreed, the Strix Halo doesn't feel good enough for $4k. It was supposed to be $2k (and was so until 6-12 months ago), which felt like a great deal. Not the best AI chip but you get what you pay for. A tinkerer's dream that could maybe even fit into a birthday gift budget for a lucky teenager. I hate to say it, but I hope they fail with their $4k box.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com