ASUS Ascent GX10 Review: 680 tok/s at Batch 64, but a Slow 1TB SSD

The ASUS Ascent GX10 runs gpt-oss-120b at 70 tok/s for one request and 680 tok/s across 64, StorageReview measured, but ASUS's US store listed it out of stock, with no price, on Nov. 2.

The GX10 is ASUS's version of NVIDIA's DGX Spark design: the same GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip and 128 GB of unified memory in a 150 x 150 x 51 mm case. Two independent reviews have measured it. ServeTheHome published its review on Jan. 4, 2026, and StorageReview published a full vLLM, thermal and storage review on Mar. 3, 2026. Our Nov. 2 comparison of six GB10 boxes placed the GX10 in the field. This review adds what that piece did not cover: idle power, the storage limits, the cooling dispute and the price history.

The price is the part that has moved most. ServeTheHome reported the 1 TB GX10 at $3,000 and the 2 TB model at $3,500 in January, when NVIDIA's 4 TB DGX Spark cost $4,000. The ASUS eShop in the US listed the 128 GB, 1 TB model (GX10-GG0010BN) at $5,999 on Oct. 30, about double the January figure. When the page was read again on Nov. 2, it showed the unit as out of stock, with a notify-me button and no price displayed.

What Is New in the ASUS Ascent GX10

The chip is not new. ASUS's spec page lists the same 20-core Arm CPU NVIDIA uses, with 10 Cortex-X925 and 10 Cortex-A725 cores, beside an integrated Blackwell GPU. Memory is 64 GB or 128 GB of LPDDR5X-8533 shared by both. ASUS rates the system at up to 1 petaFLOP of FP4 AI performance. NVIDIA, for the same chip, says that figure assumes sparsity. The box ships with NVIDIA's DGX OS, an Ubuntu variant.

What ASUS changed is the case and the board. ServeTheHome found that ASUS builds its own motherboard rather than buying NVIDIA's complete board. It also found the chassis changed from the plastic version shown at GTC 2025 to improve cooling, with extra intake vents on the bottom and two 6 W Delta fans. ASUS moved the power button to the front, a detail ServeTheHome said it wished every GB10 box had once it ran five of them in a cluster. StorageReview noted the button also carries a power light, which many GB10 systems lack.

The other change is the entry configuration. ASUS sells 1 TB and 2 TB PCIe 4.0 models and a 4 TB PCIe 5.0 model, while ServeTheHome reported in January that NVIDIA sold its own Spark only with 4 TB; NVIDIA's page now says up to 4 TB. The ASUS spec page also lists a 64 GB memory option. The ASUS eShop showed no 64 GB GX10 on Nov. 2, although NVIDIA opened 64 GB GB10 sales through ASUS and five other partners on Oct. 23.

How Fast the GX10 Runs gpt-oss-120b

The GX10 puts a 120-billion-parameter model on a desk without a GPU server. ASUS says the 128 GB unit runs inference on models of up to 200 billion parameters, and the 64 GB unit up to 100 billion. By those rated limits, gpt-oss-120b fits one 128 GB box but sits above the limit ASUS gives the 64 GB unit; no lab has tested a 64 GB GX10.

Speed depends on memory more than compute. When a model writes text, every new token requires reading the model's active weights from memory, so the bandwidth of that memory sets the ceiling. StorageReview lists the GX10 at 273 GB/s, the same figure NVIDIA gives for the DGX Spark. Every GB10 box shares that ceiling, so their speeds land together.

StorageReview's vLLM online serving test shows what that means in practice. On gpt-oss-120b, with equal input and output lengths, the GX10 ran 70 tok/s at batch 1 and 680 tok/s in aggregate at batch 64. In a decode-heavy mix, which leans hardest on memory bandwidth, it ran 45 tok/s at batch 1 and 260 tok/s at batch 64. Smaller models go much faster: gpt-oss-20b reached 1,600 tok/s at batch 64, and Llama 3.1 8B in FP4 reached 2,750 tok/s. StorageReview did not state the vLLM version or the quantization it used.

The ConnectX-7 network card adds the second answer: models too big for one box. ASUS says up to four 128 GB units cluster to 512 GB over its two 200 Gbps ports. ServeTheHome noted the card is fed by two PCIe 5.0 x4 links rather than one x8, which shows up as four network interfaces and limits how clusters can be wired.

Pros and Cons

The speed case rests on StorageReview's numbers. StorageReview ran the GX10, Acer, Dell and Gigabyte boxes in separate reviews on Mar. 3 with the same method: the GX10 reached 680 tok/s at batch 64, against 713.18 for the Acer, 670.83 for the Dell Pro Max with GB10 (listed on Dell.com as Dell Pro Precision with GB10) and 649.62 for the Gigabyte. StorageReview's own conclusion was that every Spark system shares the same board and chip, so the differences are incremental.

Storage is where the GX10 fell behind. The review unit's 1 TB Phison Gen4 drive was the only 1 TB GB10 platform StorageReview had tested, and the one with the slowest writes. In NVIDIA's GPU Direct Storage test, 16K writes peaked at 0.72 GiB/s at 32 threads, then fell back as threads rose, while 1M reads topped out at 5.12 GiB/s. StorageReview said a better SSD would help considerably. ServeTheHome found the slot itself is wired for PCIe 5.0 x4, but it takes only 42 mm drives, and ASUS ships a Gen5 drive only on the 4 TB model.

Cooling is the one point where the two reviews disagree. ServeTheHome re-ran AI samples after an hour of load and called the result a testament to ASUS's cooling, but it published no temperatures and said its heat-soak load was not realistic, with load falling off before the GPU picked up. StorageReview logged peaks of 87.3°C on the CPU and 82°C on the GPU in the prefill-heavy phase of its one-hour ramp, which it placed in the upper-middle of the comparison for the CPU and slightly warmer than some competitors for the GPU, with temperatures settling under sustained decoding. ASUS itself claims 1.6 times more efficient thermal coverage than comparable compact systems; no independent test has checked that figure. The likely reason for the split is method: one outlet measured peak temperatures, the other measured whether speed held.

Idle power is on the high side. ServeTheHome measured 42 to 47 W at idle, which includes the ConnectX-7 card even when it is not linked, and called it one of the higher-power GB10 boxes. Under load it said it could easily push the GX10 into the 120 to 130 W range before adding optics, and that it ran under 200 W on the 240 W adapter; StorageReview says the box draws up to 180 W. StorageReview put the GPU's peak at 69.77 W. For comparison, ServeTheHome measured Gigabyte's GB10 box at 36 to 37 W idle with the network card linked, but that was a 1 TB PCIe 4.0 sample in a different test, so the gap is indicative only.

Who the ASUS Ascent GX10 Fits

The GX10 fits a developer who wants NVIDIA's DGX software stack and a 120B model at batch 1 speeds near 70 tok/s, and who does not need 4 TB on board. On Oct. 30 it was listed at $5,999 for 1 TB, $951 below the $6,950 shown for the 4 TB DGX Spark in an NVIDIA marketplace copy cached Oct. 31; the storage and read dates differ, so it is not a same-configuration saving.

It also fits a small team serving several users from one box. StorageReview's 680 tok/s at batch 64 is shared across 64 requests, so each user sees far less than that, but the box keeps scaling as requests stack up. A lab building a cluster is the third fit: ASUS says up to four 128 GB units cluster to 512 GB through NVIDIA Sync and ConnectX-7 200GbE, with an external switch required for four, and ServeTheHome expects two-unit single-cable setups to be the common case.

It does not fit a buyer who streams large datasets from local disk. With the 1 TB Gen4 drive's writes topping out near 0.72 GiB/s at 16K in StorageReview's test, that buyer should look at the 4 TB Gen5 GX10 or a box sold with 4 TB Gen5 storage. It also does not fit a buyer who needs a machine this month, since ASUS's US store had none to sell on Nov. 2.

How it compares

Against the NVIDIA DGX Spark, the GX10 has the same 128 GB, the same 273 GB/s and, by ServeTheHome's Geekbench 5 runs, the same CPU speed. StorageReview measured the Spark at 701 tok/s at batch 64 on gpt-oss-120b with 256/256 input and output lengths, but in its July 6 Ryzen AI Halo review, separate from the GX10's March one, so the gap to the GX10's 680 is not a ranked result. NVIDIA's marketplace showed the Spark at $6,950 with 4 TB in a copy cached Oct. 31, with stock unverified; StorageReview's July review gave the Founders Edition at $4,699, so the Spark price is itself unsettled.

Against the Acer Veriton GN100, the GX10 lost the thermal comparison. In the same StorageReview series, the Acer peaked at 74.7°C on the CPU and 69°C on the GPU, the coolest of the group, and reached 713.18 tok/s at batch 64. Acer announced it from $3,999 in North America in September 2025, and we found no current US listing that confirms that price.

The HP ZGX Nano posted 722.9 tok/s at batch 64 in a later StorageReview run, published Apr. 24. In a review updated Oct. 5, Notebookcheck reported it at $4,759 on Amazon (date and storage not given) and $7,399 at the HP Store for 4 TB. The Dell Pro Precision with GB10, tested by StorageReview as the Dell Pro Max with GB10, measured 670.83 tok/s and listed at $7,967 on Dell.com on Nov. 2. The Gigabyte AI TOP ATOM measured 649.62 tok/s, and CDW advertised it at $7,312 with 4 TB. At the Oct. 30 listing of $5,999 the GX10 was the second-lowest of these six listed US prices ($4,759 to $7,967, across different configurations and dates), with a 1 TB SSD against 2 TB for the Dell and 4 TB for the Gigabyte and the Spark.

Outside the GB10 family, AMD's Ryzen AI Halo was listed at $3,999 with 2 TB in StorageReview's July 6 review, with 128 GB at 256 GB/s. In that vLLM test it reached 222 tok/s at batch 64 against the Spark's 701, so for serving many requests it is not a like-for-like substitute.

The table below this story sets these machines side by side. What it shows is that the GB10 boxes are one machine on speed: the decision is price, stock, storage and cooling. At its Oct. 30 listing of $5,999, the GX10 was the second-lowest of the six listed US prices ($4,759 to $7,967, across different configurations and dates), with the smallest SSD.

What to watch

The first milestone is a GX10 restock on the ASUS eShop in the US, and the price it returns at. The second is a 64 GB GX10 listing: NVIDIA's 64 GB GB10 systems have been on sale through partners, ASUS among them, since Oct. 23 from $4,999, but no independent lab has tested one yet. The third is a newer vLLM run on the GX10 itself, since StorageReview's March figures predate its July Spark run; its reviews list no software versions, so what changed in between is unknown.