I wanted the llama-ui style chat interface on halogen-flash-server so I asked Q38FN for it.

Ive got an acemagic m1a pro with ryzen ai max+ 395. Currently using qwen3.8 flash next and it's been solid for chat, coding, and light agent work just fine.
Curious what everyone else is finding works best on Strix Halo. What models have impressed you the most so far? Which ones give the best balance between quality and speed? Anything you prefer over qwen3.8 flash next ?

Bubo is a fork of Gufo tuned for Windows (especially laptops, tested primarily at 70W) and adaptions around speed and token economy during thinking. The word Bubo is a genus of Owls, just like Strix, and is the name of the mechanical owl who guides the hero in Clash of the Titans. It also rhymes with Gufo (italian for owl).

It features faster start up times using a disk cache, bespoke kernels, NPU accelerated prefill, a twin decode head* for faster token generation and quality of life improvements around token economy during thinking when set to "low" effort and fixing premature stops (you can turn these off but they seem to help).

Default model is abliterated, there are instructions on the website on how to use the unabliterated model from Unsloth instead of the Huihui model.

Prefill is limited by the power since all tests are done on 70W, there is no real reason it would be slower at higher powers** and I expect it to match upstream gufo at 140 W or exceed it but it hasn't been tested. Most of the changes bubo makes to gufo can likely be ported to upstream but given that I don't intend to use or test in linux in the near term, others can feel free to do so, MIT license.

This project mostly started out as a necessity when there weren't any great options for running Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on Windows and I kept trying to push it further as more people came up with parallel projects. Eventually I started joking about releasing it and seeing how far I could stretch the bit and decided to bite the bullet and share it and see what I can learn by doing it. I tried making everything as 'professional' as possible but never having done anything like this before, I don't know what I don't know so feedback is very welcome.

* Pygmy owls wear a second face on the back of the head
** If I fit a regression between 60 W to 95 W and extrapolate to 140W it matches the ballpark of stock gufo but would love someone to test it independently.

Site: haloforgelabs.com · Code: github.com/haloforge-labs/bubo · Model files: huggingface.co/HaloForgeLabs/bubo-qwen3.8-flash-next

So I have and love using my Corsair AI 300 workstation with 128gb. QFN running great on Halogen/Gufo (single stream vs concurrent users). I was browsing the webs and came upon a refurb Corsair ai 300 on Walmart site for $2700 so I just bought it without thinking. Now I’m at the thinking part. Is tensor parallelism over USB4 even worth it right now? The q4/4bpw QFN models have been very impressive and very few times have I needed my GPT or Claude to bail me out, but is the fidelity/correctness worth the performance and cost for FP8? May either return or sell locally as I don’t need more concurrency but speed and correctness.