I own two ASUS Ascent GX10s. Before buying the first one — and again before buying the second — I went through every GB10 machine on the market. This post is the comparison I wish had existed: not a spec-sheet rehash (the spec sheets are nearly identical by design), but a look at where the boxes actually differ, with numbers from months of running one 24/7.
The GB10 landscape: one superchip, eight chassis
When NVIDIA launched the GB10 Grace Blackwell superchip, it didn’t just build its own DGX Spark — it handed the same platform to OEMs. Today you can buy essentially the same computer from eight vendors: NVIDIA (DGX Spark Founders Edition), ASUS (Ascent GX10), Dell (Pro Max with GB10), HP (ZGX Nano G1n), Lenovo (ThinkStation PGX), MSI (EdgeXpert MS-C931), Gigabyte (AI TOP Atom), and Acer (Veriton GN100).
Every single one has, by definition:
- NVIDIA GB10 superchip (3 nm): 20-core Arm v9.2 CPU — 10× Cortex-X925 performance cores + 10× Cortex-A725 efficiency cores — plus a Blackwell GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores and 192 fifth-gen Tensor cores, compute capability 12.1 (SM 12.1, Flash Attention supported)
- 128 GB LPDDR5x-9400 unified memory shared between CPU and GPU at ~273 GB/s
- Up to 1 PFLOP FP8 sparse / 1,000 TOPS FP4 AI compute
- ConnectX-7 with 200 GbE QSFP networking (the underrated feature — more on that in upcoming posts)
- ~140 W TDP in a roughly 1-liter chassis, fed by an external USB-C power brick
- NVIDIA’s DGX OS software stack (Ubuntu 24.04 with the NVIDIA kernel)
So the silicon argument is over before it starts: no GB10 box is faster than another in any way that matters. Tokens per second are decided by the superchip and the memory, and those are identical. What you’re actually choosing is price, storage, cooling, power delivery and firmware quality, and support — and after months of ownership I’d rank cooling and firmware far higher than I did on purchase day.
The comparison table
Prices are US list/street as of July 2026 and move around a lot (the DGX Spark itself took an 18% price hike in early 2026 when memory prices spiked — from $3,999 to $4,699). Verify before quoting.
| Machine | Price (US) | Storage | NVMe gen | Notes / differentiators |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ASUS Ascent GX10 | $2,999 | 1 TB (2/4 TB configs) | Gen4 | Cheapest entry to GB10; dual vapor chamber cooling; no user upgrades supported |
| NVIDIA DGX Spark (Founders) | $4,699 (was $3,999) | 4 TB | Gen5 (only one) | The reference machine; chassis-as-heatsink design; the badge |
| Dell Pro Max with GB10 | from $2,999 | 1–4 TB | Gen4 | 280 W PSU (vs 240 W), blower with front-to-back airflow; corporate support |
| HP ZGX Nano G1n | $4,759 street ($7,399 list, 4 TB) | 1–4 TB | Gen4 | Quietest rated (22/27.6 dBA); Wi-Fi 7; huge retailer price variance |
| Lenovo ThinkStation PGX | ~$4,100 (1 TB) – $5,079 | 1–4 TB | Gen4 | “Goes corporate”: ThinkStation build and support |
| MSI EdgeXpert MS-C931 | $3,999 | 4 TB | Gen4 | Straightforward Spark twin with big storage |
| Gigabyte AI TOP Atom | $3,999 | 4 TB | Gen4 | Ties into Gigabyte’s AI TOP tooling |
| Acer Veriton GN100 | $2,999–3,999 (regional) | 4 TB | Gen4 | Aggressive US pricing; explicitly markets two-unit clustering |
Cooling and noise: where the chassis engineering actually diverges
This deserves its own section, because it’s the one area where “same superchip, different box” translates into genuinely different daily experience. ~140 W in a ~1-liter enclosure is a hard thermal problem, and each vendor solved it differently:
- NVIDIA DGX Spark uses the metal chassis itself as part of the heatsink. It works — Tom’s Hardware measured GPU temps that never exceeded 82 °C under sustained load, with the loudest reading at 37.5 dBA from 18 inches — but the case gets genuinely hot to the touch, and NVIDIA’s own developer forums carry a long thread arguing the metal casing heat-soaks and partially obstructs airflow. Not silent, but a fairly neutral fan signature.
- ASUS Ascent GX10 goes the opposite way: dual vapor chambers, copper base plates over every major chip, heat pipes into the heatsink, and multi-level fan control. In Alex Ziskind’s four-way GB10 stress test (Spark vs Dell vs GX10 vs MSI — idle power, heat-soak, fan noise, sustained tokens/sec), the GX10’s heat-soak behavior stood out: load falls off before the GPU picks back up, giving the SoC time to recover. My own unit runs its GPU in a 68–88 °C band under sustained inference; independent reviews saw CPU burst peaks around 87 °C before stabilizing. Quiet during interactive work, audible under sustained batch generation.
- Dell Pro Max with GB10 is the reviewers’ thermal favorite: a single large blower pulling front-to-back through a porous front panel, which Jeff Geerling found both quieter than the Spark and sufficient to avoid throttling entirely. Dell also ships a 280 W PSU instead of 240 W for headroom, and fixed small annoyances like the Spark’s missing power LED.
- HP ZGX Nano G1n is the only one with an official noise rating: 22 dBA idle / 27.6 dBA under load, with reviewers measuring 37–40 W idle draw and 110–140 W under typical LLM load. If the machine sits on your desk rather than in a rack or closet, that number matters more than any spec-sheet PFLOP.
Two ownership lessons that no launch review will tell you:
Fan curves live in EC firmware, and EC firmware is vendor-maintained. The NVIDIA forums document DGX Spark units hitting 96–97 °C ACPI zones with fans refusing to ramp after certain EC/UEFI updates — fixed by rolling the EC firmware back. When you buy a GB10 box you are also buying that vendor’s embedded-controller release discipline. This is exactly the kind of difference invisible on a spec sheet and decisive in month six.
The 611 MHz power-delivery wedge is a platform bug — know the fix before you need it. Every GB10 box is fed by a USB-C PD brick (240 W PD 3.1 with AVS on the Spark and GX10), and the PD microcontroller inside the brick can wedge into a safety fallback state. Symptoms: GPU pinned at 611 MHz, ~13 W draw, temperature capped around 50 °C — looks exactly like thermal throttling, isn’t. Documented across the Spark, the GX10, and Dell variants. The fix is a “cold drain”: full shutdown, unplug brick from wall and device, hold the power button 30 seconds, wait a minute, reconnect — which restores normal ~2,200 MHz / ~93 W GPU operation — followed by flashing the vendor’s PD firmware (ASUS ships one for the GX10). I keep this procedure in my runbook; it has already earned its place. It also argues for the boring advice: put the brick on a UPS and don’t buy mystery third-party bricks.
What the identical spec sheet hides
Three more months-of-ownership differences:
Storage economics. The $2,999 GX10 ships with 1 TB. GGUF hoarding is real: my model directory alone is several hundred GB (a 9B, a 35B, a 120B, an mmproj, plus ComfyUI checkpoints). ASUS officially does not support SSD replacement — swapping it yourself is classified as Customer-Induced Damage and voids warranty coverage for resulting faults. If you want 4 TB with a clean conscience, the $3,999 tier (MSI/Gigabyte/Acer) is really the ASUS price plus $1,000 for 3 TB and peace of mind. I went the other way: 1 TB local plus my NAS over the network, and it’s been fine — model load time off NAS is a one-time cost per service restart.
Firmware cadence. My GX10 has kept pace with NVIDIA’s base releases, and the DGX OS experience (driver 580.x, CUDA 13.0) has been indistinguishable from reference. That was my biggest pre-purchase worry about OEM variants and it turned out to be a non-issue — with the EC-firmware caveat above applying to every vendor equally.
Ports are near-identical; the differences are at the margins. The platform reference gives every box USB-C ports, HDMI 2.1, 10 GbE RJ45, and the dual-QSFP ConnectX-7. Margins: one of the Spark’s four USB-C ports is permanently occupied by the power brick; Dell’s three free USB-C ports carry DisplayPort 2.1 alt-mode; HP adds Wi-Fi 7. Nothing here should decide a purchase — with one exception: the QSFP ports are identical everywhere, and that’s the point. If you’re planning to cluster two units (you should — 256 GB of combined unified memory changes what you can run), there is zero networking reason to prefer the expensive boxes. My two GX10s do ~107 Gbit/s TCP and ~19 GB/s NCCL busbw over a $150 DAC cable — full write-ups coming in this series.
Where the GX10 wins
- Price per unit of the thing that matters. The compute and memory — the parts that determine what models you can run and how fast — are identical at $2,999 and at $4,699. The GX10 is the cheapest ticket to the full GB10 experience, tied with Dell’s base config and Acer’s US pricing.
- Two-for-one math. Two GX10s ($5,998) cost roughly one DGX Spark Founders plus tax — and give you 256 GB unified memory, 2 PFLOPS, and a 200 GbE cluster. That, in one line, is why I own two GX10s and zero Sparks.
- Real cooling engineering, not chassis-as-heatsink. Dual vapor chambers and graceful heat-soak recovery beat a hot metal box for a machine that runs inference around the clock.
- It’s a real DGX OS machine. Firmware, drivers, CUDA — everything tracks NVIDIA’s releases. Nothing about the ASUS badge has cost me compatibility.
- Availability. Through 2026’s supply squeezes, the GX10 has been consistently orderable when the Founders Edition wasn’t.
Where it doesn’t win
Honesty section:
- 1 TB base storage with no sanctioned upgrade path is the real weakness. Budget for the NAS workflow or the bigger config.
- Gen4 SSD — the Spark’s Gen5 drive measurably wins on model-load and GPUDirect Storage benchmarks. It shaves seconds off cold starts; it does nothing for tokens/sec once weights are resident.
- Not the quietest. If desk-side silence is the priority, HP’s 22/27.6 dBA rating and Dell’s blower design are the better picks. The GX10 is fine in a closet or on a shelf; it’s audible next to your keyboard under sustained load.
- Platform bugs are shared. The PD-brick wedge state hits the GX10 exactly as it hits the Spark — the ASUS discount does not buy you out of NVIDIA’s platform teething problems.
- No corporate support tier. Dell/HP/Lenovo exist for procurement departments, on-site service, and fleet management. If someone else pays and downtime costs money, that premium is rational.
- The badge. A DGX Spark says DGX on it. Some labs need that for the photo.
Verdict
- Solo developer, own money, wants maximum capability per dollar: ASUS GX10 (or two of them). This is my pick and I’d make it again.
- Quietest desk-side box: HP ZGX Nano at street price (never at list), or Dell Pro Max.
- Corporate buyer with procurement and SLAs: Dell Pro Max or Lenovo PGX.
- Storage-heavy, single-box, can’t run a NAS: MSI EdgeXpert, Gigabyte AI TOP Atom, or Acer GN100 at $3,999/4 TB.
- Money genuinely no object, wants the reference machine: DGX Spark Founders — it is the nicest one; it’s just not $1,700 nicer.
Next in series: GX10 unboxing, setup, and first-week gotchas — coming soon.
Sources
- Tom’s Hardware — DGX Spark Founders Edition price increase to $4,699
- Tom’s Hardware — DGX Spark review: power, heat, and noise measurements
- Alex Ziskind — four-way GB10 stress test (Spark / Dell / GX10 / MSI)
- GX10/DGX Spark PD throttle fix (611 MHz wedge state, cold-drain procedure)
- NVIDIA forums — DGX Spark thermal throttling after EC/UEFI updates
- NVIDIA forums — metal casing heat soak discussion
- Chargerlab — teardown of the DGX Spark 240 W USB-C PD adapter
- Jeff Geerling — Dell’s version of the DGX Spark fixes pain points
- HotHardware — Dell Pro Max GB10 review
- StorageReview — HP ZGX Nano G1n review (noise rating, power draw)
- ServeTheHome — ASUS Ascent GX10 review
- StorageReview — ASUS Ascent GX10 review
- ASUS — Ascent GX10 product page (cooling design)
- ASUS — GX10 FAQ (upgrade/warranty policy)
- ServeTheHome — Lenovo ThinkStation PGX review
- ServeTheHome — HP ZGX Nano G1n review
- ITPro — Dell Pro Max with GB10
- TweakTown — Acer Veriton GN100
- The Register — GB10 workstation landscape