The AMD Ryzen AI Halo is a developer system that the company has been teasing for several months. We have seen it in person and can now share our hands-on thoughts. Let us get the headline out first, then get into the details. For $3999, you get an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini PC, roughly in the form factor of the NVIDIA DGX Spark, but without the 200GbE NIC, with 128GB of memory, and what AMD pledges to make its top-tier developer experience. All of those aspects have interesting points, so let us dive into them.
AMD Ryzen AI Halo External Hardware Overview
Starting off with the box that AMD sent, we get a neat AMD pattern. Just remember this pattern for a moment until we get to the outside.
Here is the unboxing experience. You can see the AMD logo on top and in front. It would have been pretty cool if AMD had figured out how to turn these little squares on the outside of the chassis into the logo like the box above. Alas, maybe in a future version.
A small but useful feature is the quick-start guide. Some may think this is unnecessary, but since we actually stand the NVIDIA GB10 units on their sides, this is more useful than you might think.
On the front, we get a large air vent behind the AMD logo.
On the top, we get two more air vents for the fans inside that we will see in our internal overview.
The strip between the black plastic and the bottom silver plastic is an RGB strip. We will discuss it a bit more when we get inside, but we figured out one method to disable this if you want to.
On both sides, there are air vents.
On the back, another air vent, and then all of the ports.
If this looks familiar, perhaps it should, as it feels like AMD was heavily inspired by the NVIDIA GB10 platforms. Here is the NVIDIA DGX Spark as a reference.
On the back, there is a power button, then a power input, then a USB-DP Type-C port, then two more Type-C ports. The USB-DP port is USB 3.2 Gen2 and DisplayPort. The other two USB ports are USB4 ports. It would have been nice if AMD had slightly better labeling here instead of just saying “USB”. There is also a HDMI port.
For networking, there is a 10Gbase-T port, but then things diverge from the GB10 systems. Instead of having a high-end NVIDIA ConnectX-7 NIC, albeit a funky one if you have seen our The NVIDIA GB10 ConnectX-7 200GbE Networking is Really Different piece, AMD just omitted the feature. Perhaps that means USB4 RDMA networking in the future. It also means it is hard to get to something like the 8x NVIDIA GB10 cluster. Also importantly, that means you are not learning AMD’s network stack with this.
On the bottom, we get more vents. If you were counting, that is every panel.
Then there is, perhaps, the coolest physical feature: the rubber feet. These are held in place by magnets, and underneath, there are the screw holes to keep the chassis together. Almost every mini PC we review has adhesive holding the rubber feet in place, even over screws. So if you pull off the feet, you have less sticky adhesive to work with. AMD’s solution is fantastic on this small touch.
Next, let us remove the four screws and open the system.
