# The Two-Hour Machine, Priced *The computer that kept answering at about twelve tokens a second when this workshop [pulled its plug](/two-hours-on-battery/) — for a projected two hours on a battery — costs $959.00 today as one listing, or $899.98 in three parts, before tax, from one US retailer's new stock, priced on 10 September 2026 with the listing every line came from. The memory is the second-biggest line of the three-part build.* *Published 2026-09-10 (UTC) · A small (human) team and a fleet of AI agents.* **the short version:** A mini PC that writes at about twelve tokens a second on a 26-billion-parameter model costs $959.00 today as one listing, or $899.98 in three parts, before tax and before a screen, from one US retailer's new stock. The memory is the second-biggest line of the three-part build. Over three years a twenty-dollar subscription costs less; the machine buys the rest of this page. 1,402 words · about 6 minutes (at 220 words/min) · 3 tables · data kit: no https://research.strata2signal.com/the-two-hour-machine-priced/ --- ## A few words this page leans on {#a-few-words-this-page-leans-on} - **Token** — the chunk a model reads and writes in, a little under a word. Twelve tokens a second is a little over a line of text every second; around ten reads as fluent, four to six as comfortable. - **Barebones** — a mini PC sold without its memory and drive; you add both. - **SO-DIMM** — the small memory stick a laptop or mini PC takes, as against the long stick a desktop takes. - **NVMe** — the drive: a small card that plugs straight into the board, no cables. - **Mixture of experts** — a model that wakes only a few billion of its parameters for each word, so a 26- or 30-billion-parameter one writes faster than a 9-billion one that uses everything. The whole model still has to fit in memory. - **kWh** — a kilowatt-hour, the unit your electricity bill is priced in. ## What this page prices, and what it does not {#what-this-page-prices-and-what-it-does-not} Last month this workshop pulled the plug on a mini PC while a 26-billion-parameter model was writing, and the machine kept answering at about twelve tokens a second. The battery unit's own estimator put the runtime at a little over two hours; the measured stretch on battery was six minutes, from 100 to 96 per cent, and the two hours is that unit's projection from it, which the [two-hours-on-battery page](/two-hours-on-battery/) sets out table by table. Readers asked the obvious next question: what does that machine cost? This page answers it for one day, 10 September 2026, with the listing each number came from, and it will be read again on 10 October 2026 rather than edited in place. Every price is from one US retailer's new stock, in US dollars, read on that day; a used market, a second country, or a sale a week later will read differently, and the page says which listing it used wherever two disagreed. It prices the computer. It does not price a monitor, a keyboard, an operating system, or your time. Every total is before sales tax and before shipping where a listing charged it. The first build leaves $41.00 of headroom under a thousand dollars, which is 4.3 per cent of $959, so a reader whose sales tax is above that pays more than a thousand for it. The page says "under a thousand" only about the pre-tax computer, and says it here rather than in the title. ## The computer, as this workshop ran it {#the-computer-as-this-workshop-ran-it} The bench's machine is a Minisforum MS-01 mini PC with a 12th-generation Intel Core i5-12600H, twelve cores and sixteen threads, 32 GB of memory of which the operating system reports 30 GiB usable, and no graphics card. Inference ran on the processor alone. It is the size of a thick paperback and runs from a laptop-style power brick; this workshop has not measured its noise. By the battery unit's own meter it drew about 76 W while generating on mains; its idle draw, about 5 W, sat below that meter's floor and read as zero. This workshop bought its own box earlier in 2026, before the memory prices moved, for under $500 without the memory; what the same box costs today is the next section. ## Build A: the same box, bought today {#build-a-the-same-box-bought-today} | line | the listing | price | |---|---|---:| | the whole box, 32 GB, 1 TB | Newegg, "Core i5-12600H with 32GB RAM/1TB SSD", direct from Minisforum, free shipping | $959.00 | | **A1 total** | | **$959.00** | What you get for it: the machine every number on this page was measured on, ready to plug in, with room for every model in the table below except the 70-billion one. The same machine assembled from three listings read the same day: | line | the listing | price | |---|---|---:| | the barebones (no memory, no drive) | Newegg, "Core i5-12600H Barebone", listed at $799.00, shown as 45 per cent off, free shipping | $439.00 | | 32 GB DDR5-4800 SO-DIMM, two sticks | Newegg, "KingSpec 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR5 SO-DIMM Laptop RAM 4800", listed at $453.99 | $328.99 | | 1 TB NVMe drive | Newegg, "Bestoss 1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe 2280 SSD Gen3.0 x4" | $131.99 | | **A2 total** | | **$899.98** | What you get for it: the same machine, sixty dollars cheaper, with twenty minutes of your own assembly and a memory stick this workshop has not run; the bench's own memory sticks were never recorded, so the speeds below are for the class of memory, not this kit. Two things about the barebones price. The $439.00 is a discount from a $799.00 list, and a second listing for the same barebones, read the same day, sat at $589.99 plus $5.00 shipping; on that listing the three-part total is $1,055.97. Minisforum's own store showed the barebones at $679.00. The page uses the lowest price it could read and prints the others, because a reader who arrives a week later may meet any of the three. In build A2 the barebones is the biggest line and the memory is second. ## What the computer runs {#what-the-computer-runs} Quoted from the [two-hours-on-battery page](/two-hours-on-battery/), on this machine, on the processor alone, with the same fixed prompt every time (505 to 1,023 tokens, depending on each model's tokenizer), a 256-token answer, and the software's default of four threads, which is what a buyer meets before tuning anything: | model | writing speed | wait before the first word | fits in 30 GiB usable | |---|---:|---:|---| | qwen3.5:9b | 9.1 tokens a second | 16.0 s | yes | | gemma4:12b | 6.0 | 25.6 s | yes | | phi4:14b | 5.2 | 35.4 s | yes | | mistral-small3.2:24b | 3.3 | 97.7 s | yes | | gemma4:26b, a mixture of experts | 12.7 | 11.4 s | yes | | nemotron-3.5-lightning 30B-A3B, a mixture of experts | 14.6 | 14.1 s | yes, with about 5 GiB to spare | Two things a buyer should read off that table. First, the wait: on a processor, the machine reads your whole question before it writes a word, and for the 24-billion dense model that is a minute and a half of silence. Second, the last two rows: on a processor with 32 GB beside it, a 26- or 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model writes faster than a 9-billion dense one, because it wakes only a few billion parameters per word and the whole thing still fits. The source page also shows that tuning the thread count moves these rows, up by a tenth to a fifth for the dense models and down by half for the mixtures at the wrong setting; the defaults are printed here because they are what the box does out of the packaging. The one bench model that does not fit this machine is a 70-billion dense model at 41 GiB resident, and it never ran here. At 32 GB, that is the ceiling. ## Against a subscription {#against-a-subscription} A twenty-dollar-a-month subscription over three years is $720. The computer alone is $959. Running it for two hours of generation a day over three years at 76 W is about 166 kWh, which is about $25 at fifteen cents a kWh and about $50 at thirty; your bill says which. On money alone, over three years, the subscription wins. What the machine wins is the rest of this page: the model runs where you are, on your words, at a speed that reads comfortably, with nothing sent anywhere, and it keeps working when the connection or the vendor does not. The reader should decide that trade with both numbers in front of them, which is why both are here. ## What this page does not say {#what-this-page-does-not-say} It does not price the battery unit the two-hours test ran on: a 1500 VA unit this workshop already had, about $200, bought for other reasons. Most people do not need one to run a mini PC, and the two hours belong to that unit on that load, a projection from six measured minutes. It does not say what a used machine or a second retailer charges. It does not say what memory will cost next month; it says what it cost on 10 September 2026, and it will say what it costs on 10 October 2026 when that day comes. ## Who ran this, and thanks {#who-ran-this-and-thanks} The listings were read from Newegg and from Minisforum's own store by an agent and checked by a human in the same hour; the speeds are the [two-hours-on-battery page's](/two-hours-on-battery/) own, unchanged, and the battery unit's meter did the watts. This page keeps its receipts the way [every page here does](/how-we-work/). Thanks to the readers who asked what the machine cost, which is the only reason a price page exists on a research hub.