I’m considering buying the Asus GX10 over the Nvidia DGX purely on price, its $1000 saving. However, has anyone with a Asus tried to load the Nvidia iso / OS or will/can it only run a version distributed by Asus? Asus support site info on the product is dismal, so I would prefer just running Nvidia OS from and not the Asus flavour.
To clarify, like when you buy a Lenovo or Dell laptop, you can take a vanilla Windows .iso and load a “clean” unbranded version of Windows. I want to use the Nvidia OS .iso and load that on the Asus.
I was able to install Fedora 43 on it, without any issues. You should be able to use the iso provided by Nvidia. NOTE: it already comes with the DGX OS (which is the Nvidia OS). There are a few garbage configuration files on what I got, but they are easy to clean up.
If you want an easy turnkey method to reinstall the system, there might be an issue. But ASUS has put nothing in there to stop you from wiping and installing anything you want. And depending on what you want to learn or do, it is very rewarding.
According to DGX OS release notes support for DGX Spark was added in version 7.2.3 with a specific drop down option in the GRUB … or so the documentation says, and there’s lots of Spark specific commands in the docs now … I should have read that first. Anyway, looks like my question is answered.
I have the ASUS GX10 and did exactly this. I can confirm that my GX10 is working fine when re-imaged with the NVIDIA DGX Spark recovery image. The only noticable change I have observed is that the hostname changed from gx10-xxxx to spark-xxxx and the Asus wallpaper is no longer present.
I don’t see any of the thermal issues you guys are talking about in the NVIDIA sparks. Still trying to find someone to describe a scenario to reproduce their issues.
As far as I know, this is not possible. NVIDIA only offers a restore image which explicitly states it is only for the founder’s edition. It may have to do with their version having 4TB of storage, so it might with with the 4TB ASUS variant, but who knows.
The NVIDIA version is entirely theme’d with NVIDIA logos, colours and wallpapers, which is pretty cool, makes it feel like you own a DGX, which I’ve always wanted. Interesting story, I almost purchased a second hand DGX-1 for around $10,000, but then, just as I was about to go through with the purchase, NVIDIA announced the DGX Spark, now I’m glad I waited and got this instead. It’s far more practical, and of course has the latest architecture and everything, so software support won’t be an issue, power won’t be an issue, it’s super quiet, and all your VRAM is on a single GPU, which is far better than having it split across many GPUs as it was on the DGX-1 (which had 8 16GB graphics cards).
It sounds like you’re still thinking about which one you want. I can only comment on my personal reasons for getting the DGX Spark over the other GB10 variants, for me:
I like the design, as it actually looks like a small DGX-1
For inference it’s probably fine to get the 1TB variant, but if you’re doing any sort of serious AI training, 1TB is just too little in my opinion as you’ll want to save models and snapshot the state regularly while training, those things take up a lot of space. Not to mention your datasets and other models. There are also scenarios where you might want to quantise large models that take up hundreds of gigabytes into smaller quants, which again needs a lot of space. Connecting an external drive is an option, but they can be unreliable during long training runs, and if it accidentally gets disconnected during training, you’re stuffed. These are issues I didn’t want to deal with. So it comes down to what you want to do and the reliability you need. For me it was a no-brainer, the 4TB option made a lot of sense, and in the long run, I felt the extra $1000 would be worth it.
Finally was the software side of it, like you, I wanted to run NVIDIA’s own variant of the OS, where I know it doesn’t have other garbage installed on it. I also trust that NVIDIA will be supporting this system long term, whereas I feel these OEMs may just drop support for it, which may not be a thing.
What I don’t like about the founders edition: NVIDIA has by far the worst system restore image of all the options. Their image offers no live environment to access and recover your files, no option to simply reinstall the OS while keeping the home directory in-tact. You know, these are extremely basic features you would expect a restore image to have, and NVIDIA doesn’t have it, all they can do is wipe the entire drive and reimage it to factory defaults. Their image doesn’t even leave you with a running system, forcing you to take updates before you can then use the device. They also use these custom imaging scripts that are flakey at best, instead of just supplying a disk image which can be written to a USB using any number of standard imaging tools. It is absolutely awful, and definitely needs improvement on that front.