People routinely buy cars that cost double that. This is a machine that people that typically earn six figure salaries use to do their work on. Exactly the target demographic that would buy/lease expensive cars as well. And then those get used mainly to commute to work.
I don't really need one. But I do have a 4.5K mac book pro for work. Yes it's a bit overpowered. But it's the main vehicle with which I earn a living and it routinely saves me time by blazing through builds and generally doing things quickly for me. I have slightly more GPU on that thing than I need. But it's nice to have the option to experiment with some of the open weight AI models.
Haha, bloody hell, mate. $17k a pop? I bought these for $8k-ish. That's bonkers to buy this when newer flash models won't fit on this any more. DeepSeek V4 Flash seems the last in its line, and then you have to count on Qwen Next. Seems like a waste honestly.
Seems they might be selling a combo of dual RTX Pro 6000 workstation cards (non-refundable), but the setup they have, unless they change how the GPUs cooling work, isn't gonna work out thermally if you stack two of those workstation cards on top of each other. But it doesn't say WS or "Workstation", so I suppose could be the server variant too? But also doesn't say...
Hope they have good overall cooling the case, cooling doesn't seem to be mentioned, it'll be a noisy little machine no doubt :)
Hopefully... If it doesn't, mere mortals like us consumers are going to be priced out of computers altogether. It'll be the end of the personal computing era and a return to big iron mainframes.
I've noticed that some companies have flat out dropped the high memory configurations from their lineup that were offered just months ago at inflated prices. OnePlayerX had a 128GB Strix Halo tablet, RedMagic had a 24GB Android phone - both have been removed from their sites. It's a similar situation for the new Thinkpad lineup.
Kind of feels like if you spend $40K on your GPU setup, you don't want to cheap out on the PSU.
Still, you're right, I have a 1200W PSU for a single RTX Pro 6000, cost ~500 something, so still the PSU shouldn't be that large part of the total budget.
Funny thing is, you don't really want to just plug that into a wall socket. You want an uninterruptible power supply that can keep the machine running for the 5 to 8 minutes you need to get to it and shut it down safely during a power cut.
But you'll find most household power sockets aren't actually rated for the kind of power these things draw at peak. If you go for a dual GPU you're going to want to sustain a higher current. Think washer / drier / fridge kind of hookups for the UPS and that rig.
You spent $42K on the rig, you're also going to need to get an electrician in and have the electrical hookup seen to. The single 4090 I'm running put me right up to that edge where I could use a standard electrical hookup with a 1000w UPS.
So another $1K for the UPS, and $500 worth of electrical work (or more if they have to up the switch to 200 amps, for example).
When you start getting into things like this, there's the initial price, then all the pile on of tax and the infrastructure needed to run thing. It's like getting a boat. For a mere $55K you can get a small one... but that is merely the cost of entry.
So you're right. If the $42K price tag didn't make you blink, the additional $2700 in tax, and the $2K to $3K for the work in your house are going to financial hiccups. But it means the cost to start is $50K, not just the price tag.
True enough, depends how good your house electricity panel and wiring is. My basic plugs have 230V x 10A fuses so it would definitely take it to the limit. I also have some 16A which should be fine but I’d have to unplug one of the washing machine or heat pump type things. A 45k machine I would probably run on a UPS like you said. A lot of resistive heating household items use easily 2000W+ so it’s not super exotic but you do need to pay some attention
$42k and a toy CPU at that. Threadripper or EPIC if it must be AMD camp, although I'd rather it weren't (_always_ some random issues on linux). TBH, if I were buying workstation at such prices, I'd probably first take a look at what HP has (since their cooling and immunity to dust is unprecedented), and then probably BOXX and Puget. For DIY there's always supermicro at such levels.
Hopper is ~4 years old at this point though, compared to Blackwell which is ~2 years old, the difference isn't nil.
Depending on your use case, you might prefer native FP4 and FP6 low-precision support and 5th-generation Tensor Cores rather than what Hopper offers.
I think for training Hopper makes sense as it's generally a bit cheaper and the difference isn't that big, but for inference the difference widens a bunch makes a lot more sense to go with Blackwell.
You're correct, the difference isn't nil - H100 is data-center grade GPU with loads of bandwidth and compute while RTX PRO is a consumer grade GPU. The difference between the microarchitectures would make sense to point out if we had been comparing apples to apples and not apples to pits.
I would assume an H100 selling for less than $30k is a scam. I see one for 11,329€, and one for $25k but most are over $30k and I don't know how to judge these random storefronts. You've bought an H100 for $20k that was in working order recently?
Which one is the fastest and how fast is it? Even the "fast" ones doesn't seem to even reach close to consumer NVIDIA GPUs released years ago when it comes to prompt processing.
indeed. make up your mind, and also "slow/fast" mean very little given plethora of models to choose from. fast for what, slow for what. fast with which harness, etc...
But more memory is available so a larger model can be loaded. It depends on the use case which is better. Any chat or voice model will have better UX with nvidia but document or code generation will be better with apple.
it's not a binary thing. At some point Apple becomes too slow with very large models. If you can just run a model at 1 token per second and it takes 30 mins to process a long context, it's useless
If your goal is pure GPU compute, you should have got a 5090. It can bench comparable to the RTX 6000 Pro cards and is near guaranteed to outperform M5 Ultra.
There’s roughly 50% more memory bandwidth on an RTX 6000 pro versus the M5 Ultra. I imagine it really comes down to what you’re doing, I know my 5090 runs laps around the M5 Pro I have when it comes to local LLM performance (until it runs out of memory).
If it wasn’t for the fact the 6000 Pro is selling for like 100% ($9,000) over MSRP it would probably look a lot more reasonable.
I remember losing sleep when I bought my RTX Pro 6000, but somehow they keep going up in price, and waddya know I’ve even done real work that appreciates the VRAM size.
Same. Had to convince the wife, initially aimed to get two of them, ended up with one. Now my wife is berating me for not convincing her that I should have bought four and then sell two later... Can't win :)
Sold my computer + DLSR camera back in the day to afford moving countries. Can't imagine what life would have been if I didn't, very happy I did. Lived with a netbook for 2-3 years, but was before I was a professional programmer.
The prefill rates are way faster on these cards compare to apple silicon, which affects TTFT and usability for a lot of coding tasks a lot, unless you fire and forget most of the time for your use cases.
For me the operating system (and ecosystem in general) is one of the biggest reasons I use a Mac, but the unified memory pool is a benefit too. I am still distraught about the gaming situation though.
Anyone know why they chose a consumer grade CPU on this? I’m a little surprised to see a 9950X as the top option. There’s not enough PCIe lanes available to run everything without bifurcation. I imagine the GPUs probably aren’t too bothered generally… but the NVMe drives are likely to slow down as a result.
A Threadripper ain’t cheap, but if you’re spending $45k on a workstation it seems like a weird place to skimp. Not to mention you’d then have the option of shoveling a few more 6000 pros in it when you want to run something larger (assuming your home/office electrical box can support it).
Aye but at $45k you’re so deep already is that really worth the savings? It’s so much easier to manage a single system, and the performance will be in absolute terms better.
Truly, I get your point, but $45k is obscene for a workstation (because of the RAM shortage). I can’t fathom it being a reasonable decision[1] unless you’re able to churn an immense profit from it. And… if you can, it’s an expense that saves time, energy, and effort. If it is only profitable when $8k in price difference makes it viable, is that really worth the effort? An $8k increase making a difference, when you’re wholly dependent on the frontier (or near frontier) lab not releasing a model that makes your work(station) irrelevant— seems reckless. Couple that with the doubling of DeepSeek’s parameters for their flash model… and well the math just don’t math for my naive brain.
[1] I’m absolutely incapable of spending that much on a workstation so my opinions may be irrelevant… but I cannot understand the “stepping over quarters to save a penny” mentality[2].
[2] I could be missing the forest for the trees. As a result, I’d love to know how I am being shortsighted. I just can’t fathom a situation where an $8k surcharge in system RAM doesn’t make sense. It’s not about system RAM, it’s about GPU RAM, margins, and useful lifetime of the system.
This is a link to their configurable workstation on consumer boards. They offer TR or Xeon based boards too; it's just a different link/SKU: https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-major
> An $8k increase making a difference, when you’re wholly dependent on the frontier (or near frontier) lab not releasing a model that makes your work(station) irrelevant
Hmm, why? I don't understand why better models being available remotely would change the usefulness of what you already have working locally? If it works for you, it works, regardless of what the frontier labs have, and if it doesn't, it doesn't, again regardless.
The GPUs might care quite a bit about bifurcation. The RTX Pro 6000s can communicate directly between themselves over PCIe 5.0 16x and saturate the bus doing so. This is used when doing tensor parallel LLM execution for the All-Reduce steps.
Someone can work around this by including a PCIe 5.0 switch like the Broadcom PEX89048. That switch can be used to, for instance, have the two GPUs talk to each other at full PCIe 5.0 16x speeds, while talking to the motherboard at say PCIe 4.0 16x, or even 8x. As an end user, cards using that switch seem to be an AliExpress only item, but I assume an OEM like System76 could get their hands on it to place directly on the motherboard. I imagine the price of adding that to a motherboard could be less than the price of switching to a Threadripper or Xeon 600 platform.
However, I can't find any evidence that System76 has added a switch, and in fact they refer to x8/x8 multi-GPU support, making me think they didn't add a switch. To my mind, this isn't a very satisfactory setup.
Is this just a marketing stunt? From a completely ignorant user, doesn't AI reeuqires high bandwidth ram (like the GPU)? Is really DDR5’s bandwidth enough?
Are you sure about that? For the price of the top configuration here you can buy a 5-stack of 256GB Mac Studio M5 Ultras.
This dual NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 setup has 192GB of VRAM at 1.8 TB/s, versus the 5-stack of Macs that collectively have 1.25 TB at 1.2 TB/second... I'm not convinced that equation comes out in Nvidia's favour.
I absolutely love system76. Never owned one of their desktop machines, but I have a couple of their older laptops and they work fantastically for me. As in I can easily get a decade out of them and replace the batteries every few years. One of them is almost a decade old ironically enough.
I'd really like to just buy some collective shares of a GB300 NVL72 in a datacenter somewhere and have a daily token quota on a shared DeepSeek model or whatever was hot that week. I would just need to find ~100 like-minded folks at this $40k per share price to get started haha.
I've thought a little bit about this, really I suspect you'd actually want maybe 20 folks for about a 20k buy-in and a dedicated 8×B300. You could get some pretty sweet token/s. Probably a community/coop share structure. It'd be better than the GB300 which is fairly throughput optimized (not needed for 20ish folk)
That memory speed drop going from single DIMM per channel DDR5 to dual DIMM per channel is very much notable - 3600MT/s is barely any faster than what DDR4 could do in it's final days.
The CPU market seems to be missing the "HEDT" platform we used to enjoy.
I find it hard to believe any enterprise willing to drop over $40k on a workstation PC would choose `Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with the COSMIC Desktop Environment` over Ubuntu.
Why? It is built from Ubuntu[1]. I am a very happy full-time daily user. Anecdotally it is more stable and productive than Windows ever was for me, and plenty of enterprises use windows…
Thelio Mira AI
$3,299.00
Description
Specs
Warranty
Accelerate your AI development with Thelio Mira AI, System76's affordable, GPU-focused workstations, built for local AI development — so you can train, fine-tune, and iterate challenging AI workloads entirely on your own hardware.
Configure Thelio Mira with up to:
16-core AMD Ryzen 9000 Series CPU
192 GB DDR5 RAM
Dual NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 GPU
192 GB GPU memory
this is miss leading. actually it is 4gb ram a400 price.
When I saw the 192GB I first thought they might have beat Framework to market with a Gorgon Halo machine with unified RAM that Framework has teased. This is just a GPU workstation.
113 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 6.9 ms ] threadI don't really need one. But I do have a 4.5K mac book pro for work. Yes it's a bit overpowered. But it's the main vehicle with which I earn a living and it routinely saves me time by blazing through builds and generally doing things quickly for me. I have slightly more GPU on that thing than I need. But it's nice to have the option to experiment with some of the open weight AI models.
Hope they have good overall cooling the case, cooling doesn't seem to be mentioned, it'll be a noisy little machine no doubt :)
Wish I built this a few years ago!
That's a bitter pill to swallow. Most of this is the cost of the Nvidia card, and the RAM.
It would be great if China had more lithography machine....
Still, you're right, I have a 1200W PSU for a single RTX Pro 6000, cost ~500 something, so still the PSU shouldn't be that large part of the total budget.
But you'll find most household power sockets aren't actually rated for the kind of power these things draw at peak. If you go for a dual GPU you're going to want to sustain a higher current. Think washer / drier / fridge kind of hookups for the UPS and that rig.
You spent $42K on the rig, you're also going to need to get an electrician in and have the electrical hookup seen to. The single 4090 I'm running put me right up to that edge where I could use a standard electrical hookup with a 1000w UPS.
So another $1K for the UPS, and $500 worth of electrical work (or more if they have to up the switch to 200 amps, for example).
Not for the faint of wallet.
So you're right. If the $42K price tag didn't make you blink, the additional $2700 in tax, and the $2K to $3K for the work in your house are going to financial hiccups. But it means the cost to start is $50K, not just the price tag.
> 96 GB Dual NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 w/ 1000W PSU (non-refundable) +$19,169
Though I don't think there's anything stopping you from trying to stuff an H100 into this machine if you want to BYO.
Depending on your use case, you might prefer native FP4 and FP6 low-precision support and 5th-generation Tensor Cores rather than what Hopper offers.
I think for training Hopper makes sense as it's generally a bit cheaper and the difference isn't that big, but for inference the difference widens a bunch makes a lot more sense to go with Blackwell.
That sounds like a contradiction.
/J
If it wasn’t for the fact the 6000 Pro is selling for like 100% ($9,000) over MSRP it would probably look a lot more reasonable.
If running models then Apple is fine, if training or tuning or large number of users then Nvidia is king
EG As I gazed at Janice, joy with equal part contentment washed through my soul.
Can honestly say that was one of the best trades I’ve ever done. I didn’t buy another computer for 3 more years.
Oh, it's System76, that's why. Open hardware. Makes sense.
Edit: Also Nvidia
A Threadripper ain’t cheap, but if you’re spending $45k on a workstation it seems like a weird place to skimp. Not to mention you’d then have the option of shoveling a few more 6000 pros in it when you want to run something larger (assuming your home/office electrical box can support it).
Truly, I get your point, but $45k is obscene for a workstation (because of the RAM shortage). I can’t fathom it being a reasonable decision[1] unless you’re able to churn an immense profit from it. And… if you can, it’s an expense that saves time, energy, and effort. If it is only profitable when $8k in price difference makes it viable, is that really worth the effort? An $8k increase making a difference, when you’re wholly dependent on the frontier (or near frontier) lab not releasing a model that makes your work(station) irrelevant— seems reckless. Couple that with the doubling of DeepSeek’s parameters for their flash model… and well the math just don’t math for my naive brain.
[1] I’m absolutely incapable of spending that much on a workstation so my opinions may be irrelevant… but I cannot understand the “stepping over quarters to save a penny” mentality[2].
[2] I could be missing the forest for the trees. As a result, I’d love to know how I am being shortsighted. I just can’t fathom a situation where an $8k surcharge in system RAM doesn’t make sense. It’s not about system RAM, it’s about GPU RAM, margins, and useful lifetime of the system.
So they offer both options.
Hmm, why? I don't understand why better models being available remotely would change the usefulness of what you already have working locally? If it works for you, it works, regardless of what the frontier labs have, and if it doesn't, it doesn't, again regardless.
Someone can work around this by including a PCIe 5.0 switch like the Broadcom PEX89048. That switch can be used to, for instance, have the two GPUs talk to each other at full PCIe 5.0 16x speeds, while talking to the motherboard at say PCIe 4.0 16x, or even 8x. As an end user, cards using that switch seem to be an AliExpress only item, but I assume an OEM like System76 could get their hands on it to place directly on the motherboard. I imagine the price of adding that to a motherboard could be less than the price of switching to a Threadripper or Xeon 600 platform.
However, I can't find any evidence that System76 has added a switch, and in fact they refer to x8/x8 multi-GPU support, making me think they didn't add a switch. To my mind, this isn't a very satisfactory setup.
Can I afford it? Absolutely not.
From $3,299 (with just 64 GB RAM and a 4 GB GPU) to over $50,000. Very affordable indeed.
This dual NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 setup has 192GB of VRAM at 1.8 TB/s, versus the 5-stack of Macs that collectively have 1.25 TB at 1.2 TB/second... I'm not convinced that equation comes out in Nvidia's favour.
The CPU market seems to be missing the "HEDT" platform we used to enjoy.
[1]https://system76.com/support/difference-between-pop-ubuntu
As that’s unified memory à la Apple and I think up to 128gb
Configure Thelio Mira with up to:
this is miss leading. actually it is 4gb ram a400 price.dual RTX6000 price is : $40,538.00