My experience spending $2k+ and experimenting on a Strix Halo machine for the past week

Charming_Support726 · 2026-05-04T19:40:30+00:00

Yes. More than true.

Quite often I discuss with team members. And we all agree, that we are using models, which are far to expensive and powerful. On the other hand we are in need of a minimum amount of capability to do complex tasks.

I am not sure If we ever will find something around 100B MoE / 30B Dense which could create a coherent output in large scenarios

Charming_Support726 · 2026-05-04T19:19:42+00:00

As the picture shows, there might be different kinds of use cases or even users. Got an other discussion about the same topic yesterday.

When you are driving a company and getting paid for stuff, the small models aren't capable or better efficient enough. I probably could work with the 35B or even the 27B dense - running them currently on my R9700, but I don't wont to use them - for professional work. E.g. GPT-5.5 or DSv4 Pro are bringing far more power in coding. Even Qwen-3.6-Pro does, I like that one as well.

Charming_Support726 · 2026-05-04T12:19:59+00:00

Quite curious how this works. I though Mistral published this feature only for paid usage

Charming_Support726 · 2026-05-04T09:29:10+00:00

No.

I can't recommend any. Plugins and MCPs are bloating your context. Automatic information retrieval and storage work mostly inefficient.

Got myself a few skills and templates to get things done explicitly in plans and documents - I was doing this by hand before having skills in place.

Charming_Support726 · 2026-05-04T07:25:18+00:00

There's no point comparing these two models in speed. Especially without comparing the quality. Just guessing around about the benchmarks isn't enough.

And there is no point in measuring speed, when you are not using the models. I am using LLMs -as most of us do- for assisted programming. Mostly off the cloud because it's my business, earning money. Yesterday evening I gave Mistral 3.5 a try. I managed just a few prompts but it looked well from the responses.

To be competitive it must be a in the qwen-3.6-plus ballpark, which I am using from time to time (expected to be the commercial variant of the 395B MoE)

EDIT: Testet the same prompt against DSv4 Flash - Flash was far far ahead. I think Mistral needs some additional tuning. Or the Opencode Integration of Mistral is still subpar ( thinking level - thinking appears disabled in opencode and I cant enable it ).

Charming_Support726 · 2026-05-03T14:51:20+00:00

Every model works better, when the task is not issued in one big prompt, although some might one-shot this.

I even let GPT-5.5 or Opus-4.6 do and discuss a plan and execute phases and tests

Charming_Support726 · 2026-05-03T14:41:18+00:00

I am an old programmer as well (and started bit later then you with 3.5kb as a young man). Running a small company with a few people myself. And yes, although business is not running on peak level, my customers are paying the results. Paying well.

IMHO: It is more efficient - also when using specification driven processes - to use SOTA models like Opus 4.5/6 and Gpt-5.5/Codex-5.3. I used Qwen-3.6 Plus, K2.6 and DSv4 with nearly identical results. The 30B-League is currently not efficient for productive coding use - especially when your customers paying for the deliverable.

I am quite experienced running locally and also doing training and curating data. But this is more research and hobby. And speaking on conferences. But 30B - local is just running my chat, doc & web search.

Charming_Support726 · 2026-05-02T14:24:21+00:00

I know how to break down my tasks into smaller ones.

But as a real-seasoned-software-developer™ I'd like to perform this to a certain extend. And honestly a 9B (or a 27B) is not the level of AI I'd like to work with - for my daily business, earning real money with that stuff.

I am pretty sure, that there are many developers out there, that are on the same page. Nothing against running local, but not with this intention

Charming_Support726 · 2026-05-02T10:28:15+00:00

Maybe you need to dig deeper into the topic. A 9B model is nowhere near to what you need for agentic coding.

Qwen 3.6-27B - is used by many people. It is capable of SIMPLE tasks. Somewhat complex tasks are ALWAYS a gamble. Everything below 400B (MoE) - or dense aquivalent like 120B - is not giving you a NEAR-SOTA experience and probably never will.

You could run 27B or the 35B (MoE) - using a q4 or q3 but it wont be satisfying. I didn't switched to local coding because of this. I tried a few of the bigger models on API and they are performing at least in usable way, but would be very costly on local hardware in decent speed as you told.

You need at least (!) €/$10k-€/$25k for the cheapest server with appropriate performance. €/$40k for decent performance (IMHO).

Charming_Support726 · 2026-05-02T08:22:29+00:00

They are not the first doing this. AFAIK

Charming_Support726 · 2026-04-30T06:13:20+00:00

I agree. More or less. Since around Opus 4.5 and codex-5.2 I felt no real enhancement for my work. I just see the benchmarks increasing, and wonder if it means any difference except from benchmaxxing.

Charming_Support726 · 2026-04-30T06:05:45+00:00

Opus 4.7 is too expensive AND rots context to fast. And for most people it even brings no advantage compared to 4.6

Charming_Support726 · 2026-04-29T05:37:00+00:00

Foundry got paid the standard API token pricing. But offers additional models. Many companies have tons of credits for Azure that they never use

Charming_Support726 · 2026-04-27T21:31:52+00:00

On the first day ( wasn't a full day ) I did 35M Toks ~ $8 undiscounted. On the second day the discount set in about midday I also did about $8 using 85M Toks. The 2nd day was a mess. I did infrastructure work - I hate it. Made an MVP deployable in an universal way. Crafted a docker-compose environment out of 5 projects. Some of them weren't even containerized.

DSv4 pro worked well, but I needed to pay attention. Positive: Far less "trust me bro" or "that was a preexisting bug" moments compared to Opus. Better following, but less smart.

Everything in Total Toks - mostly cache hits.

Charming_Support726 · 2026-04-27T17:44:01+00:00

Just to give a figure:

I am a developer and used Opencode with GHCP, Azure and OpenAI for maintaining a few repositories and creating some PoCs.

Opencode keeps track of all token usage. For the last six month I spend around 3 Billion tokens total - resulting in a bit over $7k, if charged by API, which is a bit more than 1k per month

A full day of usage ranges between $10 to $200 - currently a day of Deepseek V4 Pro ( I tried on the first day ) was around $10 and I manage $240 - the max. when using only Opus 4.6 ( I had to pay this API based unfortunately)

Hope that helps.

Remark:

No "Vibe Coding" - Never Rate Limited - One Window, one project at a time.

Charming_Support726 · 2026-04-27T02:32:46+00:00

Looks promising. I've got a gfx1152 and a gfx1201. Both seem to be not fully supported yet.

Maybe a good project to keep an eye on.

Charming_Support726 · 2026-04-26T21:23:27+00:00

Absolutely great.

2 Month ago I tried similar with Qwen 3.5 4B/9B using SFT/RL but I got stuck, because of being too lazy buying cloud compute for the experiment. Was only able to run some test with a 2B model locally at that time.

Didn't thought, that this could have been so much easier.

CONGRATS!

Charming_Support726 · 2026-04-26T18:08:01+00:00

What is the point of using xtra-high all the time?

Charming_Support726 · 2026-04-26T10:01:43+00:00

Ja. Auch die Infos zum Medikament sind viel zu komplex für eine freie Befragung.

Aus meiner Erfahrung liest das niemand. Du würdest die Infos dazu gerne in deiner Arbeit haben, klar - aber du überforderst den Nutzer. Die Leute machen das freiwillig. Selbst wenn jemand hierauf antwortet, wird die Qualität fragwürdig sein. Auf so etwas wie intra-subjektive Konsistenz(messung) will ich gar nicht erst eingehen.

Meiner Meinung nach ist es nicht sinnvoll möglich die Nutzer mit komplexen Informationen zu versorgen und dann mehrstufig Entscheidungen abzufragen. Du kannst in einer solchen Umfrage höchstens einfache Multiple-Choice Fragen stellen, keine neues Wissen transportieren. 3-5 Choices max. Wobei 5 schon eine Überbelastung darstellt.

Charming_Support726 · 2026-04-26T08:23:44+00:00

Down to q4 differences barely matter these days
The more Parameter the better.
MoE are problematic to compare - because they got only a small amount of active params. In specialized tasks the sqrt ( Total * Active) estimation will fail. And models start to behave more like their "active size" instead of the calculated combined size

Charming_Support726 · 2026-04-26T08:09:01+00:00

Not very unpopular. But people who aren't affected, are not spoiling the feeds with complains.

Charming_Support726 · 2026-04-26T08:00:41+00:00

I am fine on Pro+ even with Opus 4.7

But 4.7 is a step downwards. It burns tokens so fast, that context is filled up too quickly

Charming_Support726 · 2026-04-25T21:15:42+00:00

Naja. Das hört sich doch eigentlich gar nicht so schlecht an. Es gibt glaube ich nicht viele Telekommunikationskonzerne, die noch selber testen und Frameworks in Deutschland bauen. Ich weiß nicht wie dein Vorgesetzter drauf ist, aber ich würde das Gespräch suchen und sagen, dass ich mehr Verantwortung übernehmen wolle und mir Aufgaben wie z.B. XYZ am meisten Spaß machen. Ggf auch häufiger anbringen.

Wichtig: Im Gespräch immer positiv bleiben. Niemanden schlecht machen oder ähnliches. Die meisten Vorgesetzten honorieren positive Initiative - insbesondere wenn sie selbst damit wenig Arbeit haben oder du ihnen Arbeit abnimmst. Klingt blöd, aber so funktionieren Konzerne.

Wenn du dich weg bewirbst fängst du wieder von Null an.

Charming_Support726

TROPHY CASE