I'm really glad I bought Strix Halo. It's a beast of a system, and it runs models that an RTX 6000 Pro costing almost 5x as much can't touch. It's a great addition to my existing Nvidia GPU (4080) which can't even run Qwen3-Next-80B without heavy quantization, let alone 100B+, 200B+, 300B+ models, and unlike GB10, I'm not stuck with ARM cores and the ARM software ecosystem.

To your point though, if the successors to Strix Halo, Serpent Lake (x86 intel CPU + Nvidia iGPU) and Medusa Halo (x86 AMD CPU + AMD iGPU) come in at a similar price point, I'll probably go with Serpent Lake, given the specs are otherwise similar (both are looking at 384-bit unified memory bus to LPDDR6 with 256GB unified memory options). CUDA is better than ROCm, no argument there.

That said, this has nothing to do with the (now resolved) issue I was experiencing with LM Studio not respecting existing Developer Mode settings with this latest update. There are good reasons to want to switch between different back-ends (e.g. debugging whether early model release issues, like those we saw with GLM-4.7-Flash, are specific to Vulkan - some of them were in that specific example). Bugs like that do exist, but I've had even fewer stability issues on Vulkan than I've had on CUDA on my 4080.