# Dell Pro Max with GB10

> Source: <https://forum.level1techs.com/t/dell-pro-max-with-gb10/242838#post_13>
> Published: 2026-08-25 16:48:40+00:00

Physical Config

As I covered in the video, it is almost identical to the NVIDIA design GB10. It comes with a 280w USBc power brick (+40w) and a few relatively minor tweaks: PXE Network booting, Power LED on the USBc cable and Power LED on the front.

It worked great via Bluetooth with the Dell KM900 wireless Keyboard and mouse! Right out of the box! In Linux!

Benchmarks

Overall, the bottom line is the performance is really similar to the nvidia reference configuration, except that the Dell GB10 has a little better staying power before throttling creeps in. I suspect this is because the front bezel and fan config have been tweaked for a little better airflow. The fan RPMS seem to be a little higher, for sure.

This is llama-bench, which is still not as optimized for the spark GB10 platform as, say, TensorRT LLM, but the performance is decent.

ggml_cuda_init: GGML_CUDA_FORCE_MMQ: no

ggml_cuda_init: GGML_CUDA_FORCE_CUBLAS: no

ggml_cuda_init: found 1 CUDA devices:

Device 0: NVIDIA GB10, compute capability 12.1, VMM: yes

| model |
size |
params |
backend |
ngl |
n_ubatch |
main_gpu |
mmap |
test |
t/s |
| llama 70B Q8_0 |
69.82 GiB |
70.55 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
2 |
0 |
pp2048 |
180.55 ± 0.32 |
| llama 70B Q8_0 |
69.82 GiB |
70.55 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
2 |
0 |
tg32 |
2.95 ± 0.00 |
| llama 70B Q8_0 |
69.82 GiB |
70.55 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
2 |
0 |
pp2048 @ d4096 |
125.25 ± 0.60 |
| llama 70B Q8_0 |
69.82 GiB |
70.55 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
2 |
0 |
tg32 @ d4096 |
2.85 ± 0.00 |
| llama 70B Q8_0 |
69.82 GiB |
70.55 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
2 |
0 |
pp2048 @ d8192 |
94.92 ± 0.08 |
| llama 70B Q8_0 |
69.82 GiB |
70.55 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
2 |
0 |
tg32 @ d8192 |
2.75 ± 0.00 |
| llama 70B Q8_0 |
69.82 GiB |
70.55 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
2 |
0 |
pp2048 @ d16384 |
63.17 ± 0.32 |
| llama 70B Q8_0 |
69.82 GiB |
70.55 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
2 |
0 |
tg32 @ d16384 |
2.57 ± 0.00 |
| llama 70B Q8_0 |
69.82 GiB |
70.55 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
2 |
0 |
pp2048 @ d32768 |
36.76 ± 1.37 |
| llama 70B Q8_0 |
69.82 GiB |
70.55 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
2 |
0 |
tg32 @ d32768 |
2.24 ± 0.00 |

./bin/llama-bench -m ../../.cache/huggingface/hub/models–ggml-org–gpt-oss-120b-GGUF/snapshots/0764c156c5379ea3939e051b46d897ca7011a0e7/gpt-oss-120b-mxfp4-00001-of-00003.gguf -ngl 99 -mmp 0 -fa 0 -b 2048 -ub 2048 -p 2048 -n 32 -d 0,4096,8192,16384,32768

ggml_cuda_init: GGML_CUDA_FORCE_MMQ: no

ggml_cuda_init: GGML_CUDA_FORCE_CUBLAS: no

ggml_cuda_init: found 1 CUDA devices:

Device 0: NVIDIA GB10, compute capability 12.1, VMM: yes

| model |
size |
params |
backend |
ngl |
n_ubatch |
mmap |
test |
t/s |
| gpt-oss 120B MXFP4 MoE |
59.02 GiB |
116.83 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
pp2048 |
966.48 ± 2.78 |
| gpt-oss 120B MXFP4 MoE |
59.02 GiB |
116.83 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
tg32 |
55.92 ± 0.18 |
| gpt-oss 120B MXFP4 MoE |
59.02 GiB |
116.83 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
pp2048 @ d4096 |
624.44 ± 0.94 |
| gpt-oss 120B MXFP4 MoE |
59.02 GiB |
116.83 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
tg32 @ d4096 |
51.19 ± 0.21 |
| gpt-oss 120B MXFP4 MoE |
59.02 GiB |
116.83 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
pp2048 @ d8192 |
466.34 ± 0.53 |
| gpt-oss 120B MXFP4 MoE |
59.02 GiB |
116.83 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
tg32 @ d8192 |
47.80 ± 0.18 |
| gpt-oss 120B MXFP4 MoE |
59.02 GiB |
116.83 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
pp2048 @ d16384 |
305.45 ± 0.15 |
| gpt-oss 120B MXFP4 MoE |
59.02 GiB |
116.83 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
tg32 @ d16384 |
42.31 ± 0.12 |
| gpt-oss 120B MXFP4 MoE |
59.02 GiB |
116.83 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
pp2048 @ d32768 |
180.88 ± 0.09 |
| gpt-oss 120B MXFP4 MoE |
59.02 GiB |
116.83 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
tg32 @ d32768 |
32.93 ± 0.10 |

build: 4dca015b7 (7070)

./bin/llama-bench -m ../../.cache/huggingface/hub/models–ggml-org–gpt-oss-20b-GGUF/snapshots/e1dc459feff949ff451ce107337a2026daa80df8/gpt-oss-20b-mxfp4.gguf -ngl 99 -mmp 0 -fa 0 -b 2048 -ub 2048 -p 2048 -n 32 -d 0,4096,8192,16384,32768

ggml_cuda_init: GGML_CUDA_FORCE_MMQ: no

ggml_cuda_init: GGML_CUDA_FORCE_CUBLAS: no

ggml_cuda_init: found 1 CUDA devices:

Device 0: NVIDIA GB10, compute capability 12.1, VMM: yes

| model |
size |
params |
backend |
ngl |
n_ubatch |
mmap |
test |
t/s |
| gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE |
11.27 GiB |
20.91 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
pp2048 |
1645.57 ± 3.76 |
| gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE |
11.27 GiB |
20.91 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
tg32 |
78.89 ± 0.39 |
| gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE |
11.27 GiB |
20.91 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
pp2048 @ d4096 |
1003.46 ± 2.41 |
| gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE |
11.27 GiB |
20.91 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
tg32 @ d4096 |
72.42 ± 0.47 |
| gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE |
11.27 GiB |
20.91 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
pp2048 @ d8192 |
739.27 ± 0.72 |
| gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE |
11.27 GiB |
20.91 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
tg32 @ d8192 |
67.85 ± 0.27 |
| gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE |
11.27 GiB |
20.91 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
pp2048 @ d16384 |
474.33 ± 0.56 |
| gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE |
11.27 GiB |
20.91 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
tg32 @ d16384 |
60.52 ± 0.22 |
| gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE |
11.27 GiB |
20.91 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
pp2048 @ d32768 |
271.23 ± 0.51 |
| gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE |
11.27 GiB |
20.91 B |
CUDA |
99 |
2048 |
0 |
tg32 @ d32768 |
47.61 ± 0.16 |

And TensorRT-LLM can do upwards of 4.5 t/s with the LLama 70b Q8 model on the same hardware, fwiw.

vLLM Benchmarks

What about Nvidia Nemotron models?

Don’t sleep on NVIDIA Nemotron Models. They’re fantastic.

These models are great models, and the performance on Nvidia hardware is first-rate. Much of the benchmarks here are to give you some idea of a rough comparison with other platforms – and are provided for the sake of completeness – but what the GB10 offers is not raw performance. Instead, GB10 is meant to give you access to the (more or less) full-stack ecosystem from Nvidia.

Vision Language Models?

NVIDIA DGX Spark GB10 is particularly strong for vision-language models because VLM workloads are dominated by GPU compute and accelerator memory locality, not raw memory bandwidth. GB10’s Blackwell GPU brings massive parallelism via CUDA cores, Tensor Cores (with FP8/FP4 support), and high SM counts, which efficiently handle convolutional vision backbones, attention blocks, and multimodal fusion layers. While LPDDR5 is way lower bandwidth, VLMs benefit from high arithmetic intensity, aggressive kernel fusion, and reuse within on-package memory, so most hot data stays close to the GPU. In practice, image encoders and cross-attention layers scale with Tensor Core throughput and CUDA scheduling, making GB10 an excellent, power-efficient platform for multimodal inference and fine-tuning despite slower system RAM.

The hyperfocus on LLM performance overshadows other capabilities of the platform, imho.

This compute advantage translates to image generation as well: diffusion and transformer-based image models are dominated by dense matrix math, attention, and convolution kernels that map cleanly onto CUDA cores and Tensor Cores, so throughput scales primarily with GPU compute rather than host memory speed. With FP8/FP4 Tensor Core acceleration, high SM occupancy, and mature CUDA kernels, the GB10 can keep denoisers, UNets, and vision transformers fed efficiently, allowing image synthesis and editing workloads to run at high utilization even when system memory bandwidth is comparatively modest.

NV FP4 Advantages

Models quantized to NVFP4 have a broad advantage because NVFP4 is a true 4-bit floating-point format designed to preserve accuracy comparable to 8-bit quantization, rather than behaving like a heavily compressed integer scheme. NVIDIA has shown that NVFP4 maintains model quality close to FP8/INT8 on many transformer workloads while enabling much higher Tensor Core throughput and lower memory traffic, allowing inference to stay compute-bound instead of dequant-bound. That distinction matters for performance: our benchmarks on GPT-OSS 20B are MXFP4—not NVFP4—so there is real headroom left, even for “native” 4-bit models like GPT-OSS, because NVFP4 is a different 4-bit format with hardware-aligned scaling and numerical behavior, not just a smaller representation of the same quantization.

Steam / Linux Gaming

The Dell Pro Max with GB10 is not designed to be a gaming machine — its strength is as a purpose-built AI workstation.

But… the Grace Blackwell Superchip sure can game! For an ARM-based Linux enthusiast or game developer, getting Steam + Box64 working and being able to run modern features like DLSS4 and multi-frame generation was an incredibly impressive experience. Box64 was working flawlessly here.

Despite occasional glitches, and the realization that this setup isn’t what the GB10 was engineered for, this is the first time I’ve thought that a significant chunk of everyman x86 market share could evaporate overnight. It’s notable for me because it demonstrates the platform is flexible and it can easily pivot beyond its AI-centric raison d’être.

… learn more about that here: [Nvidia Spark GB10: MSI EdgeXpert running Steam Games!? Cyberpunk 2077, Doom Eternal and More?!? Quickie How-To](https://forum.level1techs.com/t/nvidia-spark-gb10-msi-edgexpert-running-steam-games-cyberpunk-2077-doom-eternal-and-more-quickie-how-to/240557)
