At GTC2025, NVIDIA more or less pressed a Founders Edition DGX Spark on me (and many other conference attendees hoping for a future of local models). Full disclosure: I'm the guy letting out a screm when Jensen announced the Spark at the conference. But like everyone else, I was disappointed when we found out what the memory throughput was. I didn't use it for a year, but then Qwen3.8-Flash-Next came out, which I think is the first model where the Spark's architecture actually mattered, and the paperweight became useful. I even bought a second one in preparation for Qwen 4-Flash, and so far, I'm happy with it.

The RTX PRO 6000 was a present to myself a year ago. Same story: the drivers didn't work at first, so for a while I used it to heat my flat. Now they work, and it trains everything here without a cloud bill.

So yes, renting is the saner choice, and nothing here needs local hardware. The final training runs were about 24 GPU-hours on one RTX PRO 6000: 2 hours for the 0.8B base, 3.5 for the 2B, and 18 for all nine adapters. Verda lists that card at $2/hour on demand and $1 on spot, so roughly $50, or $25 if you're patient. The real cost was everything around it: days of synthetic data generation on the Sparks, the runs that didn't make the cut, and a 27B benchmark that kept a Mac busy and warm.

If you just want an adapter for your own task, one rented GPU for an afternoon is plenty. The adapter kit is in the repo.