The Dell Pro Max with GB10 is the most sophisticated mini AI workstation you can get – but also the most pricy

Nvidia first announced its DGX Spark mini supercomputer last year – and we've since seen a flurry of machines made by OEM partners hit the market. We've previously reviewed the outstanding Asus Ascent GX10, with a handful of alternatives like Lenovo's ThinkStation PGX and Acer's Veriton GN100. We've currently got our hands on the Dell Pro Max with GB10 – a mini PC designed to seamlessly fit into your existing IT setup.

This machine is designed specifically for what you would ordinarily describe as "power users". These include data scientists, researchers, as well as budding and current AI practitioners who want the freedom and flexibility to experiment with AI deployments within the enterprise, among a handful of other cohorts.

As such, it's powered by a custom Linux distro and hardware specifically – the Grace Blackwell Superchip – configured to let you run meaningful AI workloads on your device, rather than relying on a cloud service or remote communications. That means it's certainly not a device for everyone – and should only be considered for those who plan on making the most of the on-device AI capabilities these machines allow.

While DGX Spark-based systems are all very similar, they look very different and are also priced differently. The Dell Pro Max with GB10 comes in at a hefty price approaching £6,000 in the UK, which is close to £2,000 more than some of devices sold by its competitors. Can it make up for this asking price in other areas?

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Dell Pro Max with GB10 review: Build and design

The device itself isn't much bigger than conventional mini PCs and fits snugly on your desk thanks to its standard dimensions of 150 x 150 x 51mm – which is consistent across all DGX Spark systems from partner OEMs. They're all roughly the same weight, too, with the Dell Pro Max with GB10 weighing 1.3kg – versus the Acer's 1.2kg and the Asus' 1.4kg.

Also identical between these machines are the ports you'll find on the rear. These include three USB-C 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20Gbps) ports with DisplayPort 2.1 compatibility, one USB-C Gen 2x2 with PD in, an HDMI 2.1 port, an Ethernet port, and Nvidia's ConnectX-7 SmartNIC port used to run two of these machines in parallel. There is a marked lack of USB-A ports, so you'll need additional dongles or docks to use peripherals, outside of connecting them to a monitor and accessing them through a USB-C DisplayPort setup.

With so little separating the different models, OEMs must make the most of their physical appearance, and Dell has adopted a more understated and neater design outlook than some of the alternatives. The machine's front is covered with a hexagonal honeycomb lattice grill, with Dell's logo centered perfectly. One neat addition is a tiny power LED indicator on the left of the front, alongside an LED built into the USB-C power cable. The rear adopts the same lattice design on the upper half, with the ports laid out in the standard format on the lower half – all of which are flush against the surface.

Overall, it exudes more of an overtly corporate feel – underlined by a relatively uninspiring grey finish. It won't look out of place in any office environment, but it does lack the flair that you might get with the Acer Veriton GN100, for example.

Dell Pro Max with GB10 review: Specs and performance

The GB10 Superchip is the beating heart of the Dell Pro Max, with GB10, and lets users tap into a Grace CPU and Blackwell GPU combined to deliver an efficient setup for AI-centric work. The 20-core Arm processor combines 10 Cortex-X925 performance cores and 10 Cortex-A725 efficiency cores.

Combined with the 5nm GB20B GPU, you'll have the local potency to reach a performance capacity of 1,000 teraFLOPS of AI performance with the learner and more efficient FP4 precision, and a maximum of 170 teraflops with the industry standard FP16 precision. Both are formats for training and inference, with the 4-bit floating point format allowing for lower-precision but accelerated AI performance.

The machine can also support models of up to 200 billion parameters, which is a little more than the size of GPT-3 – but this increases to a maximum of 405 billion parameters if you connect two of these together. Each one is also capped at a maximum power draw of 240W – with a 280W power brick – but you won't encounter it unless pushing the device to its absolute limits.

Comparing DGX Spark systems to conventional machines is hard – because they're a different class of device with specific purposes, which vary from general-purpose PCs designed for almost everyone. However, when testing with Geekbench 6, we registered a massive single-core score of 3,123 and a multi-threaded performance of 19,708. This is in line with similar systems and notably higher than the comparable Framework desktop.

Unscientific testing and experimentation also pointed to easy and quick setup on AI tasks, such as image generation with ComfyUI, with the machine running quietly throughout – while producing very little heat. While not as fast or as powerful as industrial-scale systems or remotely accessible infrastructure, we were impressed with how much you can push a small machine like this.

Dell Pro Max with GB10 review: Features

Setting up the DGX OS platform, which is based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (for ARM), is an absolute breeze. The overall look and feel of the system closely follows Nvidia's design aesthetic and colour palette, and is fairly intuitive to use. Helpfully, there are a few useful tools that you can use out of the box to get started on running AI tasks.

The best place to start would be Nvidia's playbooks, a web-based platform with different recipes that centre on specific AI-related tasks. For first-timers, this library of tutorials is the best place to experiment with the tools the DGX Spark-based system can let you tap into. This won't be accessible, or even necessary, for the average user – but anybody within an organisation with a willingness to engage in AI will find it an incredibly useful way of getting to grips with what this machine is capable of.

Each recipe includes the core purpose, the practical risks of engaging in the project, and a rough time estimate to get it up and running. Setting up DGX Dashboard, for example, takes roughly half an hour and provides a user interface from which you can manage your system, manage resources, and launch JupyterLab instances. ComfyUI, too, is a great place to start – taking about 45 minutes to build and run your own AI image generator.

Generally, these playbooks are easy to follow – but there's an active community, too, that you can check in with if you run into any trouble. Which you inevitably will if you're just getting started. But the triumph in this setup is the way it democratises AI development – breaking down rather complex and unwieldy processes into digestible and easy-to-follow chunks; that's much like the device itself, which gives a far broader cross-section of the workforce access to tools and capabilities once reserved for only the most technically minded.

Also useful for power users hoping to get more from their machine is the capacity to connect two DGX Spark systems together. Nvidia Sync, which is a new feature, lets you connect your local desktop or laptop with the machine, so you can operate it remotely within the same subnet. You'll be able to run workloads or launch applications remotely and even share the display between your machines. It's a perfect way to offload tasks onto this specialised piece of hardware if you prefer working primarily with your laptop.

Dell Pro Max with GB10 review: Is it worth it?

This new class of machine is the perfect way to get started on your AI experimentation and implementation journey within the enterprise. The systems are incredibly compact, benefit from fantastic specs courtesy of the GB10 superchip, and have a deep pool of 128GB unified memory to dip into, alongside plenty of SSD storage.

Whether the Dell Pro Max with GB10 is worth it depends on how it compares with its counterparts. Admittedly, it's expensive, but it adopts a relatively understated yet mature design, which contributes well to airflow. The power draw capacity is also slightly higher at 280W versus the standard 240W. For AI practitioners and those just getting started, it's a brilliant device – it's just worth weighing up whether the subtle tweaks are worth the additional cost. If you're all-in on the Dell ecosystem, it'll complement your existing setup perfectly, but the budget-conscious would understandably be drawn to the most cost-efficient DGX Spark system out there – which isn't this one based on current retail prices.

Dell Pro Max with GB10 specifications