Step 3: Building the Business Case
So now for the fun part. If you have noticed, STH has transitioned from having more news to almost all reviews since December 2025. The mix is actually very different and something we will get into more in the Q1 2026 Letter from the Editor. As a result, more products are coming in and going out than in the past. That should make sense as if you are doing six hardware reviews a week versus three, the sheer volume of hardware doubles. We had been looking to hire someone to help with shipping and receiving for roughly 8 hours per week. Another 4 hours budgeted was for taking over the reporting function, at least initially. It might take me 2 hours, but we budgeted 4 with some hope that the person would get faster over time. The remaning 28 hours a week would be spent, at least for now, writing articles and doing some miscellaneous tasks. We budgeted $40/ hour for that role which in Arizona is quite good for this type of work.
I do not expect everyone to work at my cadence, so we generally use 50 weeks per year as our baseline. It also makes math easy for this. 40 hours per week, and 50 weeks per year is roughly 2000 hours. I mentioned that we were thinking this new hire would spend four hours a week initially doing reporting, but over time, we were hoping this would be a roughly two hour per week function.
Two hours per week at $40/ hour is $80 per week. With 50 weeks in a year, that is $4000/ year.
Call that roughly the list price of one of these little boxes. Or in other words, spending a few hours up-front building this workflow, that is underpinned by gpt-oss-120b running on a Dell Pro Max with GB10, is effectively replacing the need for that part time role.
Of course, if it ends up taking someone 4 hours per week instead of 2, then the payback period would be more like six months. We also do not need to schedule vacations, sick time, or a Christmas to New Year’s break for the box, and we get requests that week since it is the end of the year. This box is really working 52 weeks a year not 50. There are many who will rightly proclaim that we could run this on a cloud service much faster, which is true, but again, we do not have to give others access to our data sources by running it locally. For many reporting functions, the data is sensitive, so keeping access local is great. That is also a reason that even with checks on both ends, we do not give remote users access to this. I do not want Dell seeing its page views compared to HP or HPE.
Even as a small business owner with not a huge amount of revenue, buying equipment that has a 6-12 month payback period is really easy to justify.
Step 4: This is Just the Start
Even running a relatively large and slow gpt-oss-120b model, we will not hit 1% utilization on the box. Most days, it has gpt-oss-120b loaded and is just waiting for something to do. Note that we switched to vllm, but the box often looks like this:
The fact is that we have a gpt-oss-120b model sitting there, loaded, ready to use by other applications. When we discussed trading roughly a role of 2 hours/ week for $40/ hr in our simple model to give us a 12 month payback period, we also have a machine capable of running other applications.
For example, we can even use it to do simple tasks like research and help the setup of our Dell N2224X-ON switch. Just having a local gpt-oss-120b endpoint is great. After testing and seeing how much better this was in a real-world workflow, it gives me more confidence to use it elsewhere.
Next, let us talk a bit about scaling the Dell Pro Max with GB10.
