HS-VD-01 / Build risks
Helmstone turnkey
vs DIY parts sourcing.
Three axes the buyer decision actually turns on — time-to-deploy, thermals at hour thirty, and warranty. This page is about shipping-and-running risk, not cloud-dollar economics (that one is /tco) and not the six-axis decision (that one is /compare). Each row here names the specific DIY failure mode it is a counter to.
HS-VD-02 / Scorecard
Three axes, three named DIY failure modes.
Each card is one axis of the buyer decision. Helmstone sits in the brand-tinted column and names what we publish about the rig; DIY sits in the muted column and names what the buyer absorbs when they build it themselves. Where the founder has not pinned a number, the row says so honestly instead of inventing a comparison.
Helmstone turnkey
Per-SKU pinned driver branch published on /drivers, regression-tested against the FY2026 LTS pair behind every shipped tier.
Every shipped SKU ships against a per-SKU pinned branch — the kill / no-kill call happens on /drivers before the unit leaves the pallet, not after it has been racked. Buyer-side install is one of: pip-install the pinned wheel, load the kernel-mode module we publish, move on.
DIY parts sourcing
"Driver roulette".
Buyer pins CUDA × cuDNN × driver branch themselves. Anywhere from one to five days on a research clock to land a stable combo; downstream regression tests are buyer-built, because nothing behind the pin is the retailer’s contract.
Buyer absorbs the integration cost; OEM paperwork is per-vendor.
Helmstone turnkey
Junction °C min / avg / peak, sustained wall-draw, and throttle-event count over the published 48-hour burn-in on /benchmarks/rtx-5090 — worst-hour, not best-five-minute.
Every Helmstone SKU carries a thermal-validated bench sheet from the published burn-in — junction temperature, sustained wall-meter draw, and throttle-event count are pulled from the canonical run the public /benchmarks/rtx-5090 page itself reads. Buyer absorbs nothing; the rig was already stressed.
DIY parts sourcing
"Thermals at hour 30".
A retail SKU ships unstressed — junction °C is unknown to the buyer; throttle events first surface when the user’s job has been running for 30 hours. There is no per-unit benchmark to compare against, because the buyer has no instrumented rig.
Buyer absorbs the integration cost; OEM paperwork is per-vendor.
Helmstone turnkey
Three-year on-site SLA from per-unit benchmark date, throughput warranty thirty days post-install, parts pre-staged in five priority metros, cross-shipment when depot lag exceeds five business days.
One accountable paper. The SLA is named-ticket — same-day P1 in priority metros, four-business-hour on-site windows — and the parts pre-staging footprint in priority metros means a depot miss triggers cross-shipment, not a wait for back-order. The support tier a workstation ships with is the SLA it runs against.
DIY parts sourcing
"RMA blame chain".
Each part is on its own OEM warranty. GPU vendor blames PSU under spec; PSU vendor blames chassis airflow; chassis vendor blames ambient not in spec. The buyer stitches the RMA threads — or points at the integrator who chose the parts.
Buyer absorbs the integration cost; OEM paperwork is per-vendor.
HS-VD-03 / How
How each row is scored.
Every claim on this page points at an existing in-app page — the driver matrix, the canonical burn-in, the support SLA terms, the parts-pre-staging footprint. No outbound links, no third-party benchmarks, no invented numbers where a real one isn’t published.
Per-SKU driver matrix →
The pinned CUDA × cuDNN × driver-branch map for every shipped tier, with per-cell kill / no-kill status and the FY2026 LTS pair Buyer absorbs everything that isn’t on this page.
48-hour burn-in (the validation under the warranty) →
The canonical single-RTX-5090 run: junction °C min/avg/peak, sustained wall-draw, throttle events over a 48-hour vLLM workload, published so the thermals row is live, not approximated.
Support tiers + SLA →
Three support tiers (Standard / Priority / Mission-Critical), coverage scope, priority × metro response windows, technician footprint across five priority metros, and the printable clause-by-clause SLA summary.
Parts-pre-staging footprint →
The five priority metros where parts are pre-staged so a depot miss flips to cross-shipment after five business days — the SLA mechanism the RMA-blame-chain has no equivalent for.
HS-VD-04 / Hand-off
Bring this to /quote.
The three axes above are the structure. The four inputs that matter — your workload, your batch shape, your service metro, your procurement vehicle — are what a sales engineer needs before a configuration comes back. /quote replies within one business day with the SKU pinned to that build.
What we hand off
- •Tier / SKU pinned to your workload
- •Per-SKU driver pin (CUDA × cuDNN × branch)
- •Thermal-validated bench sheet (48-hour, from the canonical run)
- •Churn-pinned SLA with named-ticket windows
- •Parts pre-staging metro + dispatch lag