Best Bang for your Buck - NIMO AMD Strix Halo 128GB LPDDR5
I went down a rabbit hole of research before picking up Nimo's Strix Halo machine. At this price point, the only competitor I found were the Bosgame M5, and that suffered from looking like a gaudy spaceship. The only hangup I had was that I wasn't sure how the second M.2 slot was accessed and if it would be too difficult to add a M.2 to Oculink card to it for an eventual eGPU.
So, I decided to add guide on how to access the M.2 slots. The included documentation doesn't go over this.
1) On the back of the machine, there are 9 screws to remove. Remove them and pop off the faceplate.
2) Push against the back of the machine so that the internals slide forward out of the frame.
3) The M.2 slots are on the backside of the big heatsink. There's a metal bar going over the area, but you can squeeze a M.2 drive underneath it. The Wifi card is behind one of the bigger blocks, so it would be a lot more difficult to access.
It'll be a tight squeeze, but I think it'll be a straight shot from the M.2 slot to the back of the machine if I wanted to add an oculink adapter. USB4 is also available for plugging a eGPU through that instead.
Entering the BIOS is the F2 key. You can set the GPU RAM allocation there too.
This system uses the same Sixunited_AXB35 board as the Bosgame M5, GMKtec EVO-X2, and Corsair AI 300. GMKtec was a lot more aggressive in their marketing, so you'll find the most videos online about it, but they're using the same exact board. By comparison, the Nimo has a lot more heatsinks and metal clamping everything down. The strixhalo wiki was invaluable in learning what you can and can't do with this machine.
I tried out running some models with Fedora and Windows. You'll have to fight some of the ROCm support issues with Fedora (Vulkan is pretty straightforward), but LM Studio is a really good starting point. For Windows, you can run ComfyUI for generating video and images, but it's optimized for CUDA. I suggest sticking with LM Studio on Windows if you're a beginner since it provides a nice interface for picking and choosing what models you want loaded.
The only other system I would consider is the Framework Desktop or the Minisforum S1-MAX. Framework is approximately the same price as the Nimo, but missing the PSU, NVME, and Wifi card. From what I can tell, the Nimo's board is slightly larger than the ITX standard, so you would have to put in some custom standoffs if you want to exchange the case for a traditional computer chassis with more cooling. Minisforum will have the USB4 V2 speeds to connect a eGPU (I'm not sure how.. there's not enough PCIe lanes for them to push that much through), but at +$500 the price. Nimo has the longest return period and longest warranty, so that's why I decided to go with them.
In general, I'm pretty happy with the machine. I have reservations about the Strix Halo platform and its ability to keep up with traditional CUDA platforms for local AI. I'm also not sure if all this AI stuff is going to work out in the long run, but I'll have a pretty beefy machine for quite a long time.
