I’ve been pricing out components for my first new build in 20 years. (I’ve bought many ebay servers and a few mini PCs in between).
The parts are around $2k. But then I look at the amd ai max+ 395 PCs that are out or coming out shortly and I think I might be buying an already obsolete platform. For the same price I’d get 16 cores and over 2x the memory bandwidth.
Depends on what you’re building. If you’re looking for an overpowered SFF type of platform then yeah those AI Max+ builds may be what you want. Just keep in mind a lot of those are integrated motherboards (non-upgradable parts) and usually have minimal storage options and slots for add-in cards.
The other reason those AI Max+ PCs get a lot of press is that there’s still not a whole ton of CPUs with capable NPU built-in aka Windows Copilot+ compatible. AI Max+ happens to be one of those. (whether NPU is actually useful right now beyond Copilot+ is a whole other discussion)
So if you actually want a more extensible build out and don’t care about this Copilot+ stuff then traditional builds / non SFF builds are probably still more in line with what you want.
Yeah that’s what bothers me. But a 256GB upgrade on AM5 is $800 and extremely slow compared to the 128GB non upgradeable on Max+. So really it comes down to 1pcie slot vs 3 or 4. If there’s a usb4 to PCIe adapter, even that’s not a limitation.
I think the NPU is generally worthless but the 128GB of fast ram makes local LLM like deep seek feasible. ( I watch a lot of level1techs on YouTube. )
The concerns you brought up are the same I have!