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Posted by LabsLucas 3 hours ago

AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit(www.lttlabs.com)
122 points | 88 commentspage 2
robotswantdata 3 hours ago|
Was “only” $2k in its previous form but even in this updated box the mem bandwidth is woefully inadequate. There’s a few models with space for a dedicated GPU for hybrid inference but imo not worth it. Save your money for a Xeon or EPYC build
frugalmail 1 hour ago||
When this was half the price of the DGX Spark, it made sense. But same price is a ridiculous premium for inferior performance but the ability to run Windows.
nightski 3 hours ago||
I recently bought a few sparks from Micro Center for the exact same price and it comes with ConnectX-7 200Gbps inter-connectivity. Not sure how AMD feels it can charge exactly the same for less.
vlian2088 3 hours ago|
it's 2026.07 and 128 GB of VRAM costs a firstborn.
nightski 3 hours ago|||
The spark also has 128GB VRAM (same type) and by recently I mean I bought them last week for $3999 each.
cyanydeez 2 hours ago||
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 55 minutes ago||
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.
codedokode 2 hours ago|||
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 1 hour ago|||
> 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 42 minutes ago||
Why is that so?
ndom91 3 hours ago||
Wow the prices on these have really come up.. Got my Framework desktop mainboard (Just the motherboard + CPU + soldered 128gb RAM) in Dec 2025 for ~1900 EUR
kccqzy 2 hours ago|
Indeed December 2025 was the best time to buy.
htrp 3 hours ago||
Does this have the same memory bandwidth problems as the spark?
winterphoenix96 3 hours ago||
Yes. And the same not-enough-memory problems too
Schiendelman 3 hours ago||
What's the Spark's memory bandwidth?
jtbaker 3 hours ago|||
273 GB/s. Same ballpark as M4 Pro and Strix Halo.
Schiendelman 3 hours ago||
Ah yeah, bummer. It's fine for building something that you know needs to run faster in the next generation.
Scroll_Swe 1 hour ago||
So... I dont want to ruin gaming more but why not get a gaming PC? Figured this out 15 years ago if its good for gaming, put some more RAM in and boom you have a workstation...
Grombobulous 52 minutes ago||
The shortcoming is the memory speed/bandwisth.

With a desktop your system memory is slow and your fast graphics memory is limited in size.

To me it seems like the best bang for your buck in the BYO desktop PC space is to get a board with dual PCIe slots then find some old generation 24GB GPUs like RTX 3090.

But you’re not getting access to more than 48GB of fast memory without something similar to this or a Mac Studio.

Scroll_Swe 40 minutes ago||
Interesting thank you, almost reminds me of a PS2 then, super fast memory but not very good "traditional" GPU
frugalmail 1 hour ago||
The biggest problem is that if you want to run large (continuous memory) models, gaming graphics cards aren't sufficient, and if you manage to get graphics cards that you can chain it becomes a lot more expensive (and better performance) than these machines and GB10 machines.
syntaxing 3 hours ago||
I have another strix halo that I got for half the price (before this price increase world wide). AMD making lemonade is one of the best reasons to get a strix halo. Lemonade + qwen3.6 35B MTP @ Q8_0 + anythingLLM (in docker) replaced 90%+ of my AI usage. And it’s fully local! Setting everything up took less than 3 hours total, including installing the OS

https://lemonade-server.ai/

PHr15 3 hours ago||
Even a two-year-old Mac Studio outperforms this kit. A used unit with sufficient memory currently seems to offer the best price-to-performance ratio

"The Apple Silicon Mac Studios outperform the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 machines"

Grombobulous 55 minutes ago||
I imagine there may be users who can’t use macOS, or maybe they want the ability to upgrade storage.

The framework desktop even has a usable PCIe 4x slot available if you put the board in a different case. They sell the 128GB board on its own for $3150.

LabsLucas 1 hour ago|||
Comically, the 512 GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio that we tested isn't even available for purchase any more. The highest you can purchase from Apple is 96 GB.
bronson 50 minutes ago|||
And how much can you buy a 128GB Mac Studio for now? Go look. I think you'll be shocked.
jeffbee 3 hours ago||
A 2-year-old Mac Studio 128GB also sells for more.
snarfy 2 hours ago||
I want to play with openclaw for continuous workflows without burning my cloud credits. Do I want this?
jdiaz97 2 hours ago|
no, you openclaw is too vibecoded, use Hermes
daft_pink 3 hours ago|
It would be really nice if they included clustering support like a blueprint on how to buy several of these and cluster them to run the really large models in the best way possible.
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