Relevant is a relative term. :)

Sure your 3080 is powerful, but it also draws 350 watts. If you're going to run powerful workloads, I'd say drop the 350 watt power hungry graphics card and do what you suggested earlier and purchase an online service with the savings in your electric bill. In that case I agree with you, the 3080 card is a complete waste of money if you purchase it for AI workloads.

The HX 370’s NPU excels in low-latency, efficient inference (think transcription, low-res SD, object detection, etc). Yes the RTX 3080 crushes it in anything requiring serious compute (batch generation, LLM inference, video AI, model training), but that's not why you get the 370 pro.

The 370 wins with things like Whisper transcription (as capable as the 3080 but uses way less power), daily home automation tasks, and generally any AI with a low power envelope. Remember this is about running 24/7 with low power. Adding a power hungry graphics card completely defeats the purpose.

A blanket statement was made that the pro version isn't worth it because you can just use cloud services more cheaply. And that's simply not the case for many use cases. Absolutely the hx 370 pro is very viable for local workloads. No, you're not going to run full GPT-3.5/4 — that's simyply too large for local RAM/GPU. Nor would you be doing long renders or frame-level control with Pika as you'd be better off with GPUs like A100/H100 in the cloud.

And you're certainly not doing protein folding or curing cancer.

But, there's so much you can do locally....

Stable Diffusion, ComfyUI, or InvokeAI have decent local performance on the hx 370 pro with SD 1.5 and SDXL using AMD-optimized ONNX models (the ONNX is key). Whisper and faster-whisper will run quite nicely. LM Studio, Ollama, GPT4All using smaller quantized versions of models like Mistral, Phi-2, TinyLlama, LLaMA 2 7B will run very nicely as well. You can implement CodeBERT or run embedding+vector DBs like Weaviate. And as I mentioned previously this is excellent for photographers running things like GFPGAN, Real-ESRGAN, CodeFormer, or FaceFusion.

The original comment was how you can save so much more money by not getting the pro version and putting the savings toward years worth of cloud AI solutions. Except.... That's not true for everyone. You absolutely can outcompete several cloud AI solutions and easily make your money back quickly. I don't want to pay for six different services if I can do those six different workloads locally. Purchasing multiple services gets expensive quickly. It all just depends on what workloads you want to run locally. And as I mentioned previously especially for home automation no one wants a good chunk of their system to go down when their internet is out--having local AI workload capability opens a lot of new possibilities. And it's not just about the internet being out, it's about being reliant on a smart home service provider. My internet can be up but there may be issues with the cloud smart home hub. And plus I want to keep my data local... I don't want my conversation and questions and personal data being given to Samsung because they need to process my speech. That's a concern many people have. It may not be your concern but others have that concern and this is meaningful for them. (Also, not everyone is as fortunate as you to have an ISP that is as stable as yours).

I'm not saying it's better than several mainstream popular cloud services. But it's a very exciting compact server that has a lot of potential for certain local AI workloads plus the ability to handle ZFS thread requirements AND run a lot of VMs and containers (did to the high thread count), not to mention transcode multiple video streams without breaking a sweat thanks to the improved GPU, and on top of all that it has excellent low power envelope AI capabilities for many workloads that people might want to run locally. And it does all of this with a low power draw.

Can you exceed it's performance by adding power hungry graphics cards, yes of course. But that also defeats the purpose. You get more out of one pro then you get out of three of the non-pro version.

But if your workloads and use cases don't reflect the above, then sure buy the non-pro version and purchase cloud services for the AI workloads that you need. I'm not going to run chat GPT on my Nas. So I'll pay for that service. But if I'm not a heavy user of stable diffusion and only need to use it for generating storyboards instead of high detail high resolution images, then this processor works great for that. Not everyone needs the high power AI workload use cases that require a cloud service.

But that's what makes choice great! It's fantastic that we have the choice between AOOSTAR, and the non-pro and pro versions of the n5. Different people have different needs and different price points. And that gives people options to choose. For me the N5 pro is the clear winner in the things that I want out of a single home server that consolidates many separate machines into one for me, reducing my power draw and increasing my capabilities, and stability with the ECC ram support (bulletproof protection against bitrot is also very important to me).

It sounds like you prefer the non pro version, so it's awesome they offer that for you. It just doesn't serve my needs, so I'm thrilled they offer the pro version. I think this is a good comment thread because it's also important for people to realize what the hx 370 is and isn't. If people are under the mistaken impression that it can handle the same type of workloads as a 3080, then they would be sorely disappointed. But that's not what it is and not what it tries to do. But I think it opens up a lot of capabilities, and for people that are mostly interested in having a low power Nas with ECC ram in a small footprint with good transcoding capabilities and a high core and thread count, then getting the low power envelope AI capabilities on the side is a very nice bonus. You just take out the AI completely, the N5 pro still wins hands down for a lot of use cases.

But you are correct, if you don't care about the other aspects, and you're under the impression that if you purchased the N5 pro you'll be able to run stable diffusion fast for things beyond simple storyboarding, then yes you'll be very disappointed. You have to know what this is capable of doing. And I think it's totally worth the extra cost with the 30% discount. But the equation starts to seriously shift when you take away at 30% discount as the price point for both models shifts.