At GTC2025, NVIDIA more or less pressed a Founders Edition DGX Spark on me (and many other conference attendees hoping for a future of local models). Full disclosure: I'm the guy letting out a screm when Jensen announced the Spark at the conference. But like everyone else, I was disappointed when we found out what the memory throughput was. I didn't use it for a year, but then Qwen3.8-Flash-Next came out, which I think is the first model where the Spark's architecture actually mattered, and the paperweight became useful. I even bought a second one in preparation for Qwen 4-Flash, and so far, I'm happy with it.

The RTX PRO 6000 was a present to myself a year ago. Same story: the drivers didn't work at first, so for a while I used it to heat my flat. Now they work, and it trains everything here without a cloud bill.

So yes, renting is the saner choice, and nothing here needs local hardware. The final training runs were about 24 GPU-hours on one RTX PRO 6000: 2 hours for the 0.8B base, 3.5 for the 2B, and 18 for all nine adapters. Verda lists that card at $2/hour on demand and $1 on spot, so roughly $50, or $25 if you're patient. The real cost was everything around it: days of synthetic data generation on the Sparks, the runs that didn't make the cut, and a 27B benchmark that kept a Mac busy and warm.

If you just want an adapter for your own task, one rented GPU for an afternoon is plenty. The adapter kit is in the repo.

Was going to make the same observation. Cool to run locally - but renting seems the saner choice?

Would love to see what this run would cost from something like Verda. Just out of curiosity. I'm not going to be installing any sparks at home anytime soon.