I recently bought a few sparks from Micro Center for the exact same price and it comes with ConnectX-7 200Gbps inter-connectivity. Not sure how AMD feels it can charge exactly the same for less.
The differences are basically, sparks require ARM and sparks allow interconnects; so if you do have dreams of electric sheep to chain them together, you're not gonna get the AMD halo units.
But if you just want to putz around with a dev machine and do other things, not sure you'd want a spark.
They had it on sale last week for $3999, it will likely happen again. Also if you are willing to buy ASUS/Acer/MSI you can get them cheaper, in the same range as well. Those units are identical (mainboard/ram/chipset/connectivity), they only tend to differ in SSD being offered.
Only Asus from what I have seen. Acer/Dell units seem to run cooler than the Nvidia unit, by a noticeable margin. That said I bought the OEM units for the Gen 5 4TB SSD and the fact that it was on sale.
Same here, no issue at all with my ASUS Spark-thing. And back when I was selecting this, I watched a whole video that broke them all down by thermal mgmt and there wasn't anything wrong with the ASUS.
I do wish didn't buy the one that only had the 1TB nVME in it though. It's one of those expensive half-sized dealies, which makes upgrading expensive. Esp now.
I bought the 1T and then did it again. I don't see the need for more sad on a vllm server, I have dozens of models and quant in that space. If I need more for data, I intend to plug in an old 4T HDD
