Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max) vs Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max) by Anthropic or Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning) by NVIDIA? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-27.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Sonnet 4.6 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 30.10
Total cost: $4925

NVIDIANemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 22.90
Total cost: $596

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max) scores 7.2 points higher (30.1 vs 22.9) but costs 8.3× as much to run the benchmark ($4925 vs $596; flagship vs premium cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max) when you need intelligence above 22.9, and Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning) when 22.9 is enough.

Metric	Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max)	Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	30.1	22.9	−23.9% Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B… is 23.9% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$4,924.80	$596.33	−87.9% Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B… is 87.9% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	148.47s	15.29s	−89.7% Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B… is 89.7% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$3.00 / $15.0	$0.60 / $2.70
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning) vs Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max): 23.9% less intelligence, 87.9% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 89.7% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max): what beats it Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) scores 56.00 for $4057.
Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (High) scores 50.20 for $521.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max)Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

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Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-4-6-adaptive/nvidia-nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-4-6-adaptive/nvidia-nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill