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.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    4·
    11 hours ago

    I have nothing against AI Max 395+ systems. I’m picking up a Framework Desktop to play around with larger models than are practical on consumer GPUs myself.

    But they’re targeting a specific niche. They’re currently compelling for that niche. But running large AI models isn’t the only thing people do with a computer.

    EDIT: Say you want a machine that can render frames quickly for a video game. The CPU is probably also wanting to hit the memory and is competing for bandwidth. The game won’t be written to gain much from the GPU having fast access to a load of memory.

    And you have a maximum of 128GB, which is large for a GPU, but it’s shared, and nothing that amazing in terms of memory for the CPU. You can get motherboards that will take more RAM if your concern is giving the CPU a lot of memory rather than the GPU.

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      3 hours ago

      Say you want a machine that can render frames quickly for a video game.

      Minisforum is coming out with an AI max+ with a full PCIe slot for GPUs.