gpt-oss-20b on Dell Precision 7960 Rack (2x RTX PRO 6000, 192 GB)
20.915B (3.6B active) on 192 GB at 3,584 GB/s. Hardware details · Model details
Memory budget at 8K context
How the estimate is calculated
- Multi-GPU: 1792 GB/s per card, with each additional card contributing 40% of its bandwidth — 2509 GB/s effective, not the 3584 GB/s aggregate. Cross-GPU collectives use PCIe rather than a dedicated GPU fabric.
- Decode: reading 3.6B active parameters at 4.25 bits/weight takes 1.06 ms at 2509 GB/s x 72% achieved efficiency.
- MoE routing penalty of 15% applied: expert gathers are less bandwidth-efficient than a dense sweep.
- Per-token overhead of 1.4 ms (kernel launches, attention bookkeeping, sampling) is significant here — this model is not purely bandwidth-bound on this hardware.
- Prefill: 380 TFLOPS (FP16) x 4 for native FP4 tensor cores x 26% assumed model-FLOPs utilisation, divided by 2 x 8.7B parameters per token.
- Prefill uses 8.7B effective parameters, not the 3.6B active in decode: a batch of hundreds of tokens routes across most of the expert pool.
- MoE decode depends on how well the engine batches expert gathers; real results vary more than for dense models.
- With few active parameters on fast memory, fixed per-token overhead rather than bandwidth sets the ceiling. Real engines vary widely in how well they hide it.
- Prefill throughput is highly engine-dependent. Flash attention, batch size and quantized KV all move this number substantially, and for sparse mixture-of-experts models it is the least reliable figure we produce.
- This is a calculated estimate, not a measurement. It assumes a single request, a short prompt, no speculative decoding and a warm model already resident in memory.
Estimator version estimator_v1. Stored with every estimated row so old estimates can be regenerated when the model improves.
| Quantization | Weights | Total needed | Utilisation | Fit | Max context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
MXFP4recommended | 11.3 GB | 13.4 GB | 8% | Comfortable | 128K |
BF16 | 39.0 GB | 41.9 GB | 25% | Comfortable | 128K |
The $100 comparison uses the Codex Pro 5x / Claude Max 5x plans. A fixed planning conversion is used for USD. This compares monthly spend only: subscriptions have usage limits, local hardware has different capabilities and constraints, and taxes or regional pricing may change the charged amount. Prices checked 7 September 2026.
Monthly breakdown
| Depreciation 31,163 over 5 years, straight-line to a 5,499 residual | $519.39 |
| Electricity 51.4 kWh/month at 0.140/kWh | $7.19 |
| Cost of capital 4.0%/yr on 21,081 average capital employed | $70.27 |
| Monthly cost before tax | $596.85 |
| Electricity tax shield Running costs are deductible business expenses | −$1.51 |
| First-year expensing §179 (100.0%) | −$128.32 |
| Monthly economic cost after tax | $467.02 |
Three different numbers, deliberately
Assumptions and sources (verified 2026-09-07)
- VAT rate: No US federal VAT · verified 2026-09-07
- Marginal tax rate: IRS Publication 542 — Corporations · verified 2026-09-07
- VAT recoverable fraction: site assumption · verified 2026-09-07
- Useful life: IRS Publication 946 — How To Depreciate Property · verified 2026-09-07
- Electricity price: Site assumption · verified 2026-09-07
| Hosted model | USD/1M output | Break-even | API at your volume | Verdict | Comparison type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 Flash Alibaba Cloud | $0.42 | 303.3M/mo | $74 | API cheaper | Different model |
| DeepSeek-V4.1 Flash DeepSeek | $0.60 | 259.5M/mo | $86 | API cheaper | Different model |
| DeepSeek-V4 Pro DeepSeek | $1.98 | 64.3M/mo | $348 | API cheaper | Different model |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro (Together) Together AI | $4.40 | 22.0M/mo | $1,015 | Local cheaper | Different model |
| GLM-5.3 Z.ai | $4.40 | 29.9M/mo | $747 | Local cheaper | Different model |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 Anthropic | $5.00 | 35.9M/mo | $623 | Local cheaper | Different model |
| Hardware | Decode | Price | Fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA DGX H200 (8x H200, 1,128 GB) | ~553–796 t/s | $359,430 * | Comfortable |
| Quad RTX 5090 workstation (4x 32 GB) | ~387–556 t/s | $12,611 * | Comfortable |
| Lenovo ThinkStation PX (4x RTX PRO 6000, 384 GB) | ~366–527 t/s | $58,553 * | Comfortable |
| RTX 5090 workstation (1x 32 GB) | 419 t/s | $3,332 * | Comfortable |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell workstation (96 GB) | ~329–474 t/s | $10,359 * | Comfortable |
| RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q workstation (96 GB, 300 W) | ~329–474 t/s | $10,809 * | Comfortable |
Compare Dell Precision 7960 Rack (2x RTX PRO 6000, 192 GB) against Lenovo ThinkStation PX (4x RTX PRO 6000, 384 GB) →
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