ASUS ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3

The ASUS ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 is one of the few desktop-class machines capable of running a 1-Trillion parameter model (1T) locally.

• Llama 3.1 405B: This model fits comfortably in the 748GB VRAM even at high precision (FP16/BF16), with ample room left for massive context windows (128k+ tokens). You can run multiple instances of 405B simultaneously using MIG (Multi-Instance GPU) support.
• DeepSeek-V3 / DeepSeek-R1: These MoE (Mixture of Experts) models run at peak efficiency here. The 7.1 TB/s bandwidth ensures that the active parameter selection happens near-instantaneously, maintaining high TPS even during complex reasoning tasks.
• Qwen 2.5 72B & Mistral Large 2: These models can be run at full 16-bit precision with virtually no latency. For developers building agentic workflows, this system can host an entire swarm of these models (5-10 instances) on a single machine.

While 4-bit (GGUF/EXL2) quantization is popular for consumer hardware, the ET900N G3 is designed for FP8 and FP16 inference.

• The Sweet Spot: Running 70B+ models at FP8 provides a negligible loss in perplexity while maximizing the 5000 TFLOPS of Blackwell compute power.
• Long Context: With 748GB of VRAM, this is the premier hardware for long-context tasks (RAG over entire codebases or document libraries), as the KV cache for a 128k context window can consume upwards of 50-100GB of VRAM depending on the model.

The ET900N G3 is not a "hobbyist" machine in the traditional sense; it is a professional tool for engineers who cannot rely on cloud providers due to latency, data privacy, or cost-at-scale.

• AI Agent Developers: The system is "Open-Source Agent Ready" with support for NVIDIA NeMo-Claw. Developers building autonomous agents that require low-latency reasoning and multi-model orchestration will find this the most capable local environment available.
• Enterprise R&D Teams: The full Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) support allows a single $100k investment to be partitioned. A team of 7 developers can each have their own isolated GPU instance for testing and iteration, making it a "private cloud" in a box.
• Local Inference for Sensitive Data: Organizations in legal, healthcare, or defense can run 1T-parameter models entirely offline, ensuring zero data leakage while maintaining the performance levels of GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
• Fine-Tuning & Training: While primarily an inference powerhouse, the 748GB VRAM allows for full-parameter fine-tuning of 70B models and extensive LoRA training for 400B+ models that would otherwise require an H100 cluster.

When evaluating the ASUS ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 vs. other high-end AI hardware, the distinction lies in the Blackwell architecture and the unified memory pool.

• vs. NVIDIA DGX H100/H200: The ET900N G3 (based on GB300) offers superior memory bandwidth and the new Blackwell instruction sets, which are specifically optimized for the FP4/FP8 data types used in modern LLMs. It is more power-efficient per TFLOP than the H100 generation.
• vs. Apple Mac Studio (M2/M3 Ultra 192GB): The Mac Studio is the "budget" king for local LLMs, but it lacks the raw TFLOPS for heavy training and its bandwidth (800 GB/s) is nearly 9x slower than the ET900N G3. The ASUS machine can run models nearly 4x the size of the largest Mac configuration.
• vs. Multi-GPU RTX 4090 Clusters: While a 4x or 8x RTX 4090 setup is cheaper, it suffers from PCIe bottlenecking and lacks the unified 748GB memory space. The ET900N G3 uses NVLink-C2C, allowing the CPU and GPU to share data without the massive latency overhead of the PCIe bus, which is vital for "agentic" loops and complex inference.

For practitioners looking for the best hardware for local AI agents in 2026, the ASUS ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 represents the current ceiling of desktop AI performance. It is the definitive choice for production-ready, local LLM deployment at the 1T parameter scale.