Guides
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Guides to owning, hosting and running AI and CI hardware: the costs, the trade-offs and the setups, with sources.
- ci
- pricing
- ownership
- managed-hosting
Dedicated CI Machine vs Hosted Runners: Speed, Cost and Risk
A Ryzen 9 9950X self-hosted runner vs GitHub-hosted runners. Warm caches, per-minute pricing with real numbers, break-even volumes and the security trade-offs.
By NiceRack 7 min read
- dgx-spark
- local-ai
- ownership
- pricing
DGX Spark Explained: What Runs on 1, 2, 3 or 4 Linked Units
How much model fits on one to four linked DGX Sparks at FP8 and FP4, why 273 GB/s of memory bandwidth sets your speed, and how units are cabled together.
By NiceRack 7 min read
- buyback
- ownership
- pricing
- dgx-spark
Buying AI Hardware You Can Sell Back: How Buyback Works
How resale value works for compute hardware, what a NiceRack buyback offer will be based on, why no price is guaranteed, and what it means for total cost.
By NiceRack 5 min read
- managed-hosting
- ownership
- dgx-spark
- ci
- local-ai
Managed Rack vs Home Lab: the Real Cost of Hosting AI Hardware
Power, cooling, noise, networking, CGNAT, security, insurance and your time. An honest comparison of a managed rack versus running AI hardware at home.
By NiceRack 7 min read
- ownership
- pricing
- dgx-spark
- local-ai
- managed-hosting
Rent vs Own AI Hardware: a 36-Month Cost Comparison
Renting cloud GPUs vs owning a DGX Spark over 24–36 months, with the arithmetic, break-even hours per month, and the cases where renting is the better call.
By NiceRack 8 min read