Qwen3.8 Flash Next on Lenovo ThinkStation PX (4x RTX PRO 6000, 384 GB)
180B (6B active) on 384 GB at 7,168 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 — 3942 GB/s effective, not the 7168 GB/s aggregate. Cross-GPU collectives use PCIe rather than a dedicated GPU fabric.
- Decode: reading 6.0B active parameters at 8.50 bits/weight takes 2.38 ms at 3942 GB/s x 68% 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: 760 TFLOPS (FP16) x 2 for native FP8 tensor cores x 26% assumed model-FLOPs utilisation, divided by 2 x 32.9B parameters per token.
- Prefill uses 32.9B effective parameters, not the 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
MLX 4-bit | 98.1 GB | 104.0 GB | 31% | Comfortable | 256K |
Q4_K_M | 104.7 GB | 110.8 GB | 33% | Comfortable | 256K |
Q8_0recommended | 181.7 GB | 190.1 GB | 56% | Comfortable | 256K |
BF16 | 335.3 GB | 348.3 GB | 103% | Does not fit | 0 |
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 49,770 over 5 years, straight-line to a 8,783 residual | $829.50 |
| Electricity 85.2 kWh/month at 0.140/kWh | $11.93 |
| Cost of capital 4.0%/yr on 33,668 average capital employed | $112.23 |
| Monthly cost before tax | $953.65 |
| Electricity tax shield Running costs are deductible business expenses | −$2.50 |
| First-year expensing §179 (100.0%) | −$204.93 |
| Monthly economic cost after tax | $746.21 |
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 | 484.6M/mo | $46 | API cheaper | Different model |
| DeepSeek-V4.1 Flash DeepSeek | $0.60 | 414.6M/mo | $54 | API cheaper | Different model |
| DeepSeek-V4 Pro DeepSeek | $1.98 | 102.8M/mo | $219 | API cheaper | Different model |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro (Together) Together AI | $4.40 | 35.2M/mo | $640 | API cheaper | Different model |
| GLM-5.3 Z.ai | $4.40 | 47.8M/mo | $471 | API cheaper | Different model |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 Anthropic | $5.00 | 57.4M/mo | $392 | API cheaper | Different model |
| Hardware | Decode | Price | Fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA DGX H200 (8x H200, 1,128 GB) | ~490–705 t/s | $359,430 * | Comfortable |
| Quad RTX 5090 workstation (4x 32 GB) | ~307–442 t/s | $12,611 * | Borderline |
| Dell Precision 7960 Rack (2x RTX PRO 6000, 192 GB) | ~218–313 t/s | $36,663 * | Comfortable |
| Mac Studio M5 Ultra 256 GB | ~162–233 t/s | $8,647 * | Comfortable |
| NVIDIA DGX Station GB300 (748 GB) | ~102–147 t/s | $90,082 * | Comfortable |
| Mac Studio M5 Ultra 512 GB | ~101–145 t/s | $11,350 * | Comfortable |
Compare Lenovo ThinkStation PX (4x RTX PRO 6000, 384 GB) against Dell Precision 7960 Rack (2x RTX PRO 6000, 192 GB) →
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