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.
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!