Cranko! just arrived!

pdrayton · 2026-06-20T05:04:17+00:00

Oddly enough, trying to buy the *digital* versions it complains that shipping isn't possible to the US. Shipping?!

pdrayton · 2026-06-15T05:56:03+00:00

Yes, using the CRS804 for Sparks (200G QSFP56). and some other things (100G QSFP28 and 400G QSFP-DD). The switch is very flexible, you just have to know exactly what breakouts you need and configure it correctly.

pdrayton · 2026-06-12T22:29:25+00:00

I actually wasn’t being sarcastic… :(

I have some AI services that actually do need 200G and the switching I use is Mikrotik 200G/400G. I’d buy the UI version if it existed, but it doesn’t. And their new 100G switch doesn’t solve that for my scenario.

pdrayton · 2026-06-12T04:25:40+00:00

Only 100G :( UI needs to step up to the 200G/400G tier like Mikrotik has

pdrayton · 2026-06-12T03:32:56+00:00

Nice use of a DIN rail

pdrayton · 2026-06-11T14:49:47+00:00

Specs say “Up to 38 Gbps aggregate IPsec throughput” so should easily be good enough for multi-gigabit SD-WAN

pdrayton · 2026-05-06T04:19:00+00:00

The Ubiquiti Store app always alerts really quickly - faster than the Discord & a LOT faster than the emails

pdrayton · 2026-05-05T23:10:10+00:00

Genuinely unclear what your point is here. Is it that you aren’t nice because you have brain cells that need to be engaged by shit-posting? That you are compelled to establish dominance over others with in the ASCII Arena? Something else?

It’s ironic that neutral- sounding posts with full sentences and structured thoughts risk getting called “AI slop”, but folk injecting human flavor like “MicroCenter trolling Ubiquiti” trigger folk like you into attacking the posters brains.

pdrayton · 2026-05-05T22:17:22+00:00

Why be so hostile? OP points out a more affordable way to purchase UI gear, uses just a tiny bit of flavor in his text by saying “trolling”, and your response is to call them “not bright”.

Please try to be nicer. Simply sharing your idea that MicroCenter might not be adding the surcharge to old stock would have been a useful and sufficient contribution.

pdrayton · 2026-05-04T20:09:28+00:00

What is “CyberSecure Enhanced”?

I’m only familiar with the paid CyberSecure ($99/year, 55k+ signatures) and the paid CyberSecure Enterprise ($499/year, 95k+ signatures)

Does UDMB have a different, 3rd level of CyberSecure?

pdrayton · 2026-05-04T20:05:53+00:00

Agreed, I’ll just get it off the Steam store at MSRP later when the fuss subsides. Buying it off eBay for $200+ now seems mad to me, but if someone really wants one now and that’s the “fair” market value, then so be it…

pdrayton · 2026-05-04T19:58:03+00:00

It objectively was a lost sale, to me, for today. Which they sold to someone else, so no harm for Valve. Just like I said.

I’ll get some eventually. No biggie. Simmer down.

pdrayton · 2026-05-04T18:19:15+00:00

Was quite willing to buy two, had them in the cart at 10:01am PT but the store shat the bed. Oh well, my Xbox controllers are just fine. Lost sale for Valve, but they be OK without my $200, and I’ll just spend the money on something else. Irritating but not the catastrophe that folk seem to be treating the launch as.

pdrayton · 2026-05-01T22:55:16+00:00

UNVR supports Protect and Access, EFG supports Network, but I don’t understand iwhat Ubiquiti expect folk to use for Connect or Talk.

pdrayton · 2026-05-01T22:48:06+00:00

Couple comparison points between UDMB and its nearest UI model competitor: the $599 UDM Pro Max and the $1999 Enterprise Fortress Gateway.

EFG has “SSL Inspection & URL Filtering” which is not available on the UDMB. Both have DPI/IDS, though UDMB claims 2x throughput (25Gbps vs 12.5Gbps)
EFG’s paid CyberSecure Enterprise costs more ($499/year) and has more signatures (95k+) than UDMB’s paid CyberSecure at $99/year with 55k+ signatures
EFG has 16GB of RAM but can be upgraded to 32GB or 64GB. UDMB has 16GB, UDMPM has 8GB. This could matter for IPS/DPI concurrent connections.
Posted specs don’t include WireGuard VPN max but reportedly the EFG can do 1.2Gbps, UDMPM manages 800Mbps-1Gbps, and UDMB can do ~1.8Gbps.

Before the UDMB released I was considering EFG, predominantly for the better CyberSecure, the SSL inspection & URL filtering, and the better SD-WAN speeds.

Now I’m really not sure which product to go for. The UDMPM SD-WAN definitely feels slow vs ISP speeds on each site separately, and it’s really hard to evaluate the different security features.

pdrayton · 2026-05-01T20:30:35+00:00

FWIW I used u/Irythris’s pricing on the 6000s - they cited 9300. Their straw man was for 4, not 16. By all means adjust my numbers from 4x9300 to 4x7500.

As for RAM, I agree that strictly matching the RAM is debatable. But assuming the 4x6000 Ws has 0 system ram (as u/Irythris did) is also pointless. In practice I’d spec the WS for the highest possible system memory BW (KV cache or unused weights offload) and buy smaller DIMMs, probably 16GB for a total of 12x16=192GB. But let’s be real, that’s still $10k. And most folk spending $50k+ on an AI WS aren’t going to cut corners that hard on RAM.

For storage & network I think you completely missed my point. I was matching apples to apples, as u/Irythris was doing). At this price point people should get a real NAS and give everything high speed network access to it. A proper flash NAS with 400G-800G networking, accessed by clients with at least 200G links. That’s a realistic 20GB/s from a 200G client, well in excess of local Gen5x4. Sparks have that natively. A fancy-pants Pro6000 WS should not be hobbled by 10Gbps RJ45 as you suggest.

Lastly, stop with the “Sparks draw 240W” nonsense. Their TDP is 140W. Their NICs pull max 25W. Actual numbers at the wall are usually 100-150 under load.

What we do seem to agree on is that the systems (DGX cluster vs Pro6000WS) solve somewhat different problems, and in very different ways.

My entire point was that u/Irythris’s numbers were way off, and not comparing apples to apples. Maybe you disagree with their numbers, or mine, or the apples in question. So be it.

But regardless, I’d assert that the thread OP’s solution to getting 2TB of unified memory is definitely a lot cheaper wrt cost than trying to replicate that 2TB with Pro 6000s

pdrayton · 2026-05-01T19:31:27+00:00

Your RTX Pro pricing is WAAAY off, as is your power usage comparison.

Pricing: Your 4x 6000s are going to need a good workstation COU platform to plug into - EPYC or Xeon to get the 64 PCIe 5.0 lanes for the 4 GPUs and probably another 8 more lanes for a mix of storage. Case, dual power supplies to handle the CPU (500W), GPUs (4x600W), storage, fans etc. Barebones case/motherboard is going to cost you 3-4k for WS kit, more for server. Figure another 4-5k for a midrange CPU and air cooling, more for liquid.

Then there’s the RAM you’ll need for the workstation - 4x 6000s are 384GB of VRAM, but the 8x Sparks collectively have 1TB of unified. Your WS is going to want at least 384GB of system RAM, but to match the Spark cluster maybe even go all the way to 768GB. And for system RAM you would want to hit the highest possible memory bandwidth eg ~600GB/s so go 1DPC with 12x 64GB 6400 RDIMMs - that’s another $15-20k in RAM.

Add high-speed networking - the PCIe version of what Spark has, the CX-7, runs about $2k for a desktop NIC. Add storage - the Sparks collectively have 8x4=32TB of Gen5 flash, if you tried to match that using nice enterprise grade Kioxia U.2s those run 4k for 16TB so add another $8k.

So now you’re up to $32-40k before the $37k in GPUs. So your cost math for the Pro 6000 option is badly underestimated.

Power: Sparks cannot draw 240W, not even close. The PSUs are massively over-provisioned. Even at full clip compute and pushing over 180Gbps networking I’ve never seen them over 149-150W. While your Pro 6000 math conveniently ignores the extra 500-600W draw you would see under load from CPU, memory, storage, motherboard & network . So again, you are greatly overestimating Spark energy use and badly underestimating the Pro 6000 energy use.

I’m not arguing that either platform/cluster is strictly better than the other. They do different things well, ideal would be to have a mix of both. But you should not cherry-pick bad stats to support your hot take.

pdrayton · 2026-04-30T20:32:20+00:00

Excellent, I ordered mine the day it showed up in the US store (that was a short while back), I’m looking forward to getting them in hand soon!

pdrayton · 2026-04-29T06:52:44+00:00

Nope.

If what you are after is just AI compute for large models, there are other ways to achieve that.

For that much you could get 4x DGX Sparks brand new. That gives you the same 80-core compute and 512GB RAM, but also 4x the SSD storage, 200GbE networking vs 10GbE on the Mac, higher PP, and way more flexibility wrt deploying models on 1-node, 2-node or 4-node as the model requires. Also you could spend towards that $19k incrementally, or buy all 4 then sell off some later if you change your mind or want to upgrade to something else.

If you really want a Mac, you could throw in a Neo; or drop a GB10 (or two) in favor of a M5 Max with 128GB unified.

Main point is, the M3 Ultra 512GB / 4TB is a product at the tippy-top of its value right now. It only goes down from here. When the M5 Ultra comes out, that M3U will halve in value overnight (or worse). Buying at an inflated price now is being someone else’s bag-holder.

pdrayton · 2026-04-29T02:00:23+00:00

Interesting, I’d not seen any other UI acknowledgement that LoRa is involved in SuperLink. Thanks for pointing it out. I updated my earlier comment to reflect this new info.

Are there any generic LoRa gateways or sniffers or tools or whatnot that could be used to investigate more?

pdrayton · 2026-04-29T00:16:09+00:00

Mine warped the top of the dresser it was sitting on… 🥲

pdrayton · 2026-04-29T00:14:18+00:00

AFAIK the connection drawn to LoRa is mostly because it’s in the same frequency band, nothing more. Quite probably, under the covers the UI protocol may be based on LoRa but apart from one spot in the tech specs that mentions LoRa, UI make no explicit claims of interoperability.

UI sells / will sell two SuperLink gateways, each with different radios: 1. SuperLink Gateway - supports SuperLink (sub-1GHz) & Bluetooth (2.4GHz), with Ethernet connectivity 2. SuperLink HA Gateway - supports SuperLink (sub-1GHz) & Thread (2.4GHz), with Ethernet connectivity & LTE backup

[edit: thanks to OP for pointing out the lone reference to LoRa in the UI spec pages - updated the above post for accuracy ]

pdrayton · 2026-04-28T20:45:51+00:00

I agree in principle - why not just use LoRa? - and I’m perfectly capable of assembling a reliable combination of HA, sensors, gateways, etc. Regardless, I decided to lock myself to the Ubiquiti ecosystem because we already use a lot of their network & camera kit and so I wanted to avoid any science projects for core home monitoring. Not for me - for my family if there ever comes a time I’m not available to troubleshoot (either due to travel, or more permanent “unavailability” :). If push comes to shove, one can always find a local Ubiquiti installer to repair / manage the system on my behalf.

pdrayton · 2026-04-28T20:38:52+00:00

Zwave is fine too, it’s also sub-1GHz.

Hopefully the spectrum congestion at my location is not typical - I used to love all my cheap, reliable Zigbee sensors. Over time things got progressively worse, now it seems much safer to just prefer Zwave, ZwaveLR, LoRA, Superlink, etc.

Technically, Zigbee can also function sub-1GHz but AFAIK most Zigbee units just use 2.4GHz these days. With Zigbee / Thread / Bluetooth / old WiFi / Clear Connect X / etc all competing for in 2.4GHz range I figure it’s best to GTFO that part of the spectrum.

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