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I bought 4x Asus GX10 with the 1TB option. I don't understand why, but it's the only model in the whole lineup that isn't priced insanely. They were briefly on

I bought 4x Asus GX10 with the 1TB option. I don't understand why, but it's the only model in the whole lineup that isn't priced insanely. They were briefly on sale with a $200-off coupon, but they show up on warehouse deals from time-to-time as well.

swiftcoder 21d ago
> it's the only model in the whole lineup that isn't priced insanely $4,000 isn't priced insanely? ye gads
- nijave 21d ago
  "For new hardware in 2026 with 128Gi of high-speed memory" Checked a couple days ago and looks like we're at about 3.5x 2020 memory prices (looking at just $/GB).
- a3w 21d ago
  I thought 4000 in sum. No wait, 4000 per, plus tax. Or EUR pricing to similar accord. Ouch.
  - swiftcoder 21d ago
    Yeah, that little cluster costs about the same as a brand-new Dacia Sandero.
    - Bluestein 21d ago
      Yeah, yeah. BUT, will the Sandero be ... load-bearing? :)
      - KptMarchewa 21d ago
        It can bear the load of a few people, at least.
        Bluestein 21d ago
        Hey, I can at least say you will get more value (or, at least more predictable value) from a Dacia than from Anthropic's tokens: "Upgrade to [SUPER DUPER] for 5x the [TOKEN-SERF PACKAGE] token use!" Actual net work doable with/intelligence supplied by the [TOKEN-SERF PACKAGE]: Unknown. Fluctuating.-
        swiftcoder 21d ago
        > you will get more value (or, at least more predictable value) from a Dacia I picked up an older Dacia Sandero for cheap a few years back - it's the best money I've ever spent on a car, hands down. That car does not quit.
    - PcChip 21d ago
      to save others from having to look up what that is like I did, it's a car
- esafak 21d ago
  Yes, but it was $200 off!
- swatcoder 21d ago
  Compare to the cost of professional-grade tools in other trades and craft hobbies. Sure, $4000 can be a lot of if you're a casual hobbyist or are struggle to meet everyday lifestyle costs, but it's definitely not "insane" if this is the trade you make your living from or if you've established a lifestyle that affords disposable income for your hobbies. And for some people, $4000 for a device you have complete control over and can repurpose and tinker with to your own needs and curiosities is a much much more justifiable expense than a $200/mo rental for some narrow-access tool that somebody else controls.
  - swiftcoder 21d ago
    It's "insane" compared to the $1,500 it should have cost before the RAM crisis
  - chews 21d ago
    I am pretty confident that given a $200 subscription on any of the big labs, you're getting $4000-$8000 per month in subsidized tokens... do what you wan't with your dough... and I too have a spark that I got really early (October 2025), but no, economically it does not compare to what's runnable locally in terms of quality from the frontier models. Economically, it looks like for as long as there are subscriber plans, you're better off renting. Before getting the spark, I was just using a google colab account, their $49 dollar plan allows you access to h100's and I can run qwen there in a Jupyter notebook... and if I really need that web front end I can just use cloudeflair/tailscale/the local ssh client to reverse tunnel it.
    - overgard 21d ago
      The cloud stuff is definitely a much better economic value, but I would argue: 1. You learn a lot more running this stuff yourself (especially since you can poke at its internals if you're interested or watch the reasoning chain.) Just being a consumer of this stuff doesn't really teach you much about it other than model & harness specific tricks that become obsolete pretty quickly. (IE, your Claude.md from 6 months ago probably needs a rewrite). Which is fine, I don't think you're going to be "left behind" if you're not a hardcore AI enthusiast or anything (I'm not), but as a guy that's always been interested in computer science I want to see how it ticks. 2. You can't really depend on this subsidization lasting forever IMO. I know the financials thing has been beaten to death but I guess I'm in the camp that it's good to be in control of your tools so that you can go elsewhere if the economics change. I like to check in with ccusage pretty frequently, and honestly like if I were paying API prices for Claude I'd probably be paying thousands a month.
- booty 21d ago
  Compared to pricing from 3 years ago, it's insane. The Sparks admittedly are kind of anemic: 273GB/sec is the same bandwidth as a midrange 4060, although (depending on how you configure things) you can effectively have much greater bandwidth by connecting them. Compared to 1-2 years worth of LLM tokens for a full-time software engineer making $100K+/year, a one-time spend of $12K for 4 Sparks for on-prem private LLM inference starts looking reasonable, particularly if privacy is an important consideration. It starts looking even more reasonable if running something like a private cloud to service multiple developers because then you likely need less hardware per developer. (Also, it is going to be a long time until RAM+GPU prices return to what we used to call "normal." If ever. I am not endorsing the current state of affairs and I am not saying you wrong to find it insane, but it is definitely the new reality)
- TacticalCoder 21d ago
  > $4,000 isn't priced insanely? ye gads It depends. My bicycle was in the 5-digits brand new (now I paid it 1/5th of that and I do thank the first owner for that: the 8 000 out of 10 K I saved were put into stocks, that's his opportunity cost, not mine). Or I know a great many a going to cry "audiofool", but I can say with certainty the following does sound better than the stereo setup of those crying audiofool: https://youtu.be/TQg9FTBMcTQ https://youtu.be/TQg9FTBMcTQ (not my setup but I've got those speakers: same thing, 15 K EUR brand new for the pair... Previous owner forked the money to buy these brand new and, well, I didn't... And I just hooked them to a wonderful, cheap, fully-integrated Yamaha amp: amazing sound). If your hobby is DIY job around the house, the cost of tools can very quickly add up too: having 20 K worth of tools is definitely not unthinkable. You like old cars? Pricey hobby. Some here even track their cars: tires and brake pads budget (and overall car budget and depreciation)... Through the roof. There's a saying that you're not really into computers if your setup doesn't cost more than your car. Is $16 K ($4 K x 4) a lot? It's six months of rent for me and for many here I'm sure. It's not "crazy crazy". Can anyone afford that? Definitely not. But there are way more insane things out there. And thanks to the individuals that go through to all the pain of setting those up, we've got feedback, tutorials, explanation, numbers, etc. as to how to run those at home. For example I helped my brother set up VMs and GPU passthrough and he's now running uncensored models locally and showing me the different answers between the uncensored models and the commercial, censored, ones. So to GP who bought four of these: we need more people like you on HN, keep it going, blog about it, be "crazy"!
- Tepix 21d ago
  They only went up from 3000€ to 4000€ which isn't a lot. For comparison the cheapest Strix Halo 128GB went from 1600€ to 2600€ in the same timeframe.
  - dgellow 21d ago
    So, literally the same 1k increase?
    - Tepix 19d ago
      Yes! But, you know, percentages...
  - swiftcoder 20d ago
    > They only went up from 3000€ to 4000€ which isn't a lot. Keep in mind that the DGX Spark was delayed quite a while, meaning that starting 3k price tag is already well into the RAM crisis - just 2 years ago, a 128GB DDR5 kit could be had for $600
bmurphy1976 21d ago
~$4000 USD each on Amazon, $175 for the cable.
- mmastrac 21d ago
  The cables are ~USD $50 from AliExpress although I'm not sure what the tariff situation is for Americans (I think I paid $75 all-in CAD for them)
  - nijave 21d ago
    Big "depends". Ali has "ships from China" and "ships from US" stuff. In a lot of cases, though, Amazon also tends to have cheap Chinese knockoffs for a comparable price (although sometimes their product ranking buries them and/or promotes the more expensive knockoffs) Edit: Yeah I see an ONTi QSFP56 on Amazon for $45, 10Gtek QSFP112 for $62
cmrdporcupine 21d ago
I mean, I have the same machine and the pricing is only what it is because it has that 1TB nVME in it instead of larger. nVME prices are insane and have been for months. Reality is on a single spark I'm constantly running out of room and it being an odd size M.2 slot it's a pain to upgrade. I'm setting up a NAS over RDMA via ConnectX though, that's fun.
- mmastrac 21d ago
  I already have a recycled QNAP-now-TrueNAS that has 10G connections into the fleet so the 1TB doesn't bother me at all. I did some rough math and I don't think I'll ever need to load weights off NFS for what I'm doing so far, but the capability is there.
ycui7 21d ago
because it has 1T ssd not 4T
niutech 19d ago
Alternatively, you can buy cheap modded RTX 3080 20GB VRAM for $500 on Alibaba and pair 2 of them.

swiftcoder 21d ago

> it's the only model in the whole lineup that isn't priced insanely $4,000 isn't priced insanely? ye gads

nijave 21d ago
"For new hardware in 2026 with 128Gi of high-speed memory" Checked a couple days ago and looks like we're at about 3.5x 2020 memory prices (looking at just $/GB).
a3w 21d ago
I thought 4000 in sum. No wait, 4000 per, plus tax. Or EUR pricing to similar accord. Ouch.
- swiftcoder 21d ago
  Yeah, that little cluster costs about the same as a brand-new Dacia Sandero.
  - Bluestein 21d ago
    Yeah, yeah. BUT, will the Sandero be ... load-bearing? :)
    - KptMarchewa 21d ago
      It can bear the load of a few people, at least.
      - Bluestein 21d ago
        Hey, I can at least say you will get more value (or, at least more predictable value) from a Dacia than from Anthropic's tokens: "Upgrade to [SUPER DUPER] for 5x the [TOKEN-SERF PACKAGE] token use!" Actual net work doable with/intelligence supplied by the [TOKEN-SERF PACKAGE]: Unknown. Fluctuating.-
        swiftcoder 21d ago
        > you will get more value (or, at least more predictable value) from a Dacia I picked up an older Dacia Sandero for cheap a few years back - it's the best money I've ever spent on a car, hands down. That car does not quit.
  - PcChip 21d ago
    to save others from having to look up what that is like I did, it's a car
esafak 21d ago
Yes, but it was $200 off!
swatcoder 21d ago
Compare to the cost of professional-grade tools in other trades and craft hobbies. Sure, $4000 can be a lot of if you're a casual hobbyist or are struggle to meet everyday lifestyle costs, but it's definitely not "insane" if this is the trade you make your living from or if you've established a lifestyle that affords disposable income for your hobbies. And for some people, $4000 for a device you have complete control over and can repurpose and tinker with to your own needs and curiosities is a much much more justifiable expense than a $200/mo rental for some narrow-access tool that somebody else controls.
- swiftcoder 21d ago
  It's "insane" compared to the $1,500 it should have cost before the RAM crisis
- chews 21d ago
  I am pretty confident that given a $200 subscription on any of the big labs, you're getting $4000-$8000 per month in subsidized tokens... do what you wan't with your dough... and I too have a spark that I got really early (October 2025), but no, economically it does not compare to what's runnable locally in terms of quality from the frontier models. Economically, it looks like for as long as there are subscriber plans, you're better off renting. Before getting the spark, I was just using a google colab account, their $49 dollar plan allows you access to h100's and I can run qwen there in a Jupyter notebook... and if I really need that web front end I can just use cloudeflair/tailscale/the local ssh client to reverse tunnel it.
  - overgard 21d ago
    The cloud stuff is definitely a much better economic value, but I would argue: 1. You learn a lot more running this stuff yourself (especially since you can poke at its internals if you're interested or watch the reasoning chain.) Just being a consumer of this stuff doesn't really teach you much about it other than model & harness specific tricks that become obsolete pretty quickly. (IE, your Claude.md from 6 months ago probably needs a rewrite). Which is fine, I don't think you're going to be "left behind" if you're not a hardcore AI enthusiast or anything (I'm not), but as a guy that's always been interested in computer science I want to see how it ticks. 2. You can't really depend on this subsidization lasting forever IMO. I know the financials thing has been beaten to death but I guess I'm in the camp that it's good to be in control of your tools so that you can go elsewhere if the economics change. I like to check in with ccusage pretty frequently, and honestly like if I were paying API prices for Claude I'd probably be paying thousands a month.
booty 21d ago
Compared to pricing from 3 years ago, it's insane. The Sparks admittedly are kind of anemic: 273GB/sec is the same bandwidth as a midrange 4060, although (depending on how you configure things) you can effectively have much greater bandwidth by connecting them. Compared to 1-2 years worth of LLM tokens for a full-time software engineer making $100K+/year, a one-time spend of $12K for 4 Sparks for on-prem private LLM inference starts looking reasonable, particularly if privacy is an important consideration. It starts looking even more reasonable if running something like a private cloud to service multiple developers because then you likely need less hardware per developer. (Also, it is going to be a long time until RAM+GPU prices return to what we used to call "normal." If ever. I am not endorsing the current state of affairs and I am not saying you wrong to find it insane, but it is definitely the new reality)
TacticalCoder 21d ago
> $4,000 isn't priced insanely? ye gads It depends. My bicycle was in the 5-digits brand new (now I paid it 1/5th of that and I do thank the first owner for that: the 8 000 out of 10 K I saved were put into stocks, that's his opportunity cost, not mine). Or I know a great many a going to cry "audiofool", but I can say with certainty the following does sound better than the stereo setup of those crying audiofool: https://youtu.be/TQg9FTBMcTQ https://youtu.be/TQg9FTBMcTQ (not my setup but I've got those speakers: same thing, 15 K EUR brand new for the pair... Previous owner forked the money to buy these brand new and, well, I didn't... And I just hooked them to a wonderful, cheap, fully-integrated Yamaha amp: amazing sound). If your hobby is DIY job around the house, the cost of tools can very quickly add up too: having 20 K worth of tools is definitely not unthinkable. You like old cars? Pricey hobby. Some here even track their cars: tires and brake pads budget (and overall car budget and depreciation)... Through the roof. There's a saying that you're not really into computers if your setup doesn't cost more than your car. Is $16 K ($4 K x 4) a lot? It's six months of rent for me and for many here I'm sure. It's not "crazy crazy". Can anyone afford that? Definitely not. But there are way more insane things out there. And thanks to the individuals that go through to all the pain of setting those up, we've got feedback, tutorials, explanation, numbers, etc. as to how to run those at home. For example I helped my brother set up VMs and GPU passthrough and he's now running uncensored models locally and showing me the different answers between the uncensored models and the commercial, censored, ones. So to GP who bought four of these: we need more people like you on HN, keep it going, blog about it, be "crazy"!
Tepix 21d ago
They only went up from 3000€ to 4000€ which isn't a lot. For comparison the cheapest Strix Halo 128GB went from 1600€ to 2600€ in the same timeframe.
- dgellow 21d ago
  So, literally the same 1k increase?
  - Tepix 19d ago
    Yes! But, you know, percentages...
- swiftcoder 20d ago
  > They only went up from 3000€ to 4000€ which isn't a lot. Keep in mind that the DGX Spark was delayed quite a while, meaning that starting 3k price tag is already well into the RAM crisis - just 2 years ago, a 128GB DDR5 kit could be had for $600

bmurphy1976 21d ago

~$4000 USD each on Amazon, $175 for the cable.

mmastrac 21d ago
The cables are ~USD $50 from AliExpress although I'm not sure what the tariff situation is for Americans (I think I paid $75 all-in CAD for them)
- nijave 21d ago
  Big "depends". Ali has "ships from China" and "ships from US" stuff. In a lot of cases, though, Amazon also tends to have cheap Chinese knockoffs for a comparable price (although sometimes their product ranking buries them and/or promotes the more expensive knockoffs) Edit: Yeah I see an ONTi QSFP56 on Amazon for $45, 10Gtek QSFP112 for $62

cmrdporcupine 21d ago

I mean, I have the same machine and the pricing is only what it is because it has that 1TB nVME in it instead of larger. nVME prices are insane and have been for months. Reality is on a single spark I'm constantly running out of room and it being an odd size M.2 slot it's a pain to upgrade. I'm setting up a NAS over RDMA via ConnectX though, that's fun.

mmastrac 21d ago
I already have a recycled QNAP-now-TrueNAS that has 10G connections into the fleet so the 1TB doesn't bother me at all. I did some rough math and I don't think I'll ever need to load weights off NFS for what I'm doing so far, but the capability is there.

ycui7 21d ago

because it has 1T ssd not 4T

niutech 19d ago

Alternatively, you can buy cheap modded RTX 3080 20GB VRAM for $500 on Alibaba and pair 2 of them.