gpt-oss-120b on NVIDIA DGX Station GB300 (748 GB)
116.829B (5.1B active) on 748 GB at 7,100 GB/s. Hardware details · Model details
Memory budget at 8K context
How the estimate is calculated
- Decode: reading 5.1B active parameters at 4.25 bits/weight takes 2.54 ms at 7100 GB/s x 15% achieved efficiency.
- MoE routing penalty of 15% applied: expert gathers are less bandwidth-efficient than a dense sweep.
- Per-token overhead of 1.0 ms (kernel launches, attention bookkeeping, sampling) is significant here — this model is not purely bandwidth-bound on this hardware.
- Prefill: 2500 TFLOPS (FP16) x 4 for native FP4 tensor cores x 22% assumed model-FLOPs utilisation, divided by 2 x 24.4B parameters per token.
- Prefill uses 24.4B effective parameters, not the 5.1B 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 | 63.0 GB | 66.5 GB | 10% | Comfortable | 128K |
BF16 | 217.6 GB | 225.7 GB | 35% | 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 79,272 over 5 years, straight-line to a 10,810 residual | $1,321.20 |
| Electricity 72.9 kWh/month at 0.140/kWh | $10.20 |
| Cost of capital 4.0%/yr on 50,446 average capital employed | $168.15 |
| Monthly cost before tax | $1,499.55 |
| Electricity tax shield Running costs are deductible business expenses | −$2.14 |
| First-year expensing §179 (100.0%) | −$315.29 |
| Monthly economic cost after tax | $1,182.12 |
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 | 767.6M/mo | $49 | API cheaper | Different model |
| DeepSeek-V4.1 Flash DeepSeek | $0.60 | 656.7M/mo | $57 | API cheaper | Different model |
| DeepSeek-V4 Pro DeepSeek | $1.98 | 162.8M/mo | $230 | API cheaper | Different model |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro (Together) Together AI | $4.40 | 55.8M/mo | $673 | API cheaper | Different model |
| GLM-5.3 Z.ai | $4.40 | 75.8M/mo | $495 | API cheaper | Different model |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 Anthropic | $5.00 | 90.9M/mo | $413 | API cheaper | Different model |
| Hardware | Decode | Price | Fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA DGX H200 (8x H200, 1,128 GB) | ~541–778 t/s | $359,430 * | Comfortable |
| Quad RTX 5090 workstation (4x 32 GB) | ~339–487 t/s | $12,611 * | Comfortable |
| Lenovo ThinkStation PX (4x RTX PRO 6000, 384 GB) | ~317–456 t/s | $58,553 * | Comfortable |
| Dell Precision 7960 Rack (2x RTX PRO 6000, 192 GB) | ~259–373 t/s | $36,663 * | Comfortable |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell workstation (96 GB) | ~257–369 t/s | $10,359 * | Comfortable |
| RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q workstation (96 GB, 300 W) | ~257–369 t/s | $10,809 * | Comfortable |
Compare NVIDIA DGX Station GB300 (748 GB) against Mac Studio M5 Ultra 512 GB →
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