Really wanted to buy a FW Desktop for a new local AI project - impressed with the FW ethos and products and would have been totally happy to buy into the FW community - but I struggled to justify the FW price premium.
I ended up buying a GMKTec Evo-X2 (395 Strix Halo as per FWDT) with 96GB RAM and 2TB SSD (and Win11 Pro - I will probably end up dual booting but ‘free’ Win11 will sometimes be handy). Price for this in the UK was GBP2100 including 20% VAT/sales tax. The 128GB version would have been GBP2.7K. Reading around I concluded that 64GB was maybe going to be too tight for medium size models, but 128GB too expensive. So 96GB seemed to be a sweet spot with better value and still able to run somewhat larger models. Unfortunately FW do not seem to do a 96GB DT model and so my choice was between the GMKTec at GBP2100 and the FWDT128 at well over GBP3K. Struggled with this decision for several days but in the end just couldn’t justify a 60-70% price premium for what is probably a minimal benefit in practice from the extra RAM of the 128GB FWDT model. Of course, it is still a somewhat arbitrary decision that 64 is too tight, 96 is adequate and 128 too much of a luxury, but the buying decision has to end somewhere.
Genuinely sad not to go the FW route but maybe in the future there will be another FW buying option.
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I think it’s probably worth keeping in mind that some of that premium isn’t about performance on the machine but support for a company doing something different. As they scal prices will hopefully continue to fall. That said it’s a big difference, glad to hear you found something that suits your needs!
@Martin_D Yes, I understand completely. And I would have been prepared to pay say a 20-30% premium to support the very worthwhile FW approach. But 60-70% premium was just too much. Of course part of the difference was that GMKTec offered a 96GB option. Given the extreme price of RAM currently and the fact that smaller models are improving all the time, maybe FW might consider a 96GB model - I am no hardware designer but I’m guessing that substituting 96 for 128GB should be a fairly easy change to make.
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I ran into a similar problem when looking to by my first FW laptop, the price compared to what you can get in other markets is getting significantly higher. I got lucky and was able to find a FW laptop second hand which made it a no brainer.
Curious for the FW desktop if you looked into buying second hand or was that also just out of budget?
Interesting idea, but no I did not consider the used option. For something like a higher-end computer I would be quite wary of buying used TBH, but maybe that’s just me. I know there are some good bargains for business laptops like Lenovo Thinkpad models that have just come off say a 3-year lease, but not sure that a FW DT really fits a similar niche.
Actually, I just checked and right now there seems to be precisely zero FWDT models of any variant on eBay 
, so chances are that I didn’t miss out there.
Edit: Ah, I just became aware of the Community Marketplace which I had not noticed before - very possibly you meant to look there? But still i don’t see any recent 128GB DT units offered there for UK/EU region.