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canpanyesterday at 11:44 PM3 repliesview on HN

I was thinking to get 2x r9700 for a home workstation (mostly inference). It is much cheaper than a similar nvidia build. But still not sure if good value or more trouble.


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stephlowtoday at 12:12 AM

I own a single R9700 for the same reason you mentioned, looking into getting a second one. Was a lot of fiddling to get working on arch but RDNA4 and ROCm have come a long way. Every once in a while arch package updates break things but that’s not exclusive to ROCm.

LLM’s run great on it, it’s happily running gemma4 31b at the moment and I’m quite impressed. For the amount of VRAM you get it’s hard to beat, apart from the Intel cards maybe. But the driver support doesn’t seem to be that great there either.

Had some trouble with running comfyui, but it’s not my main use case, so I did not spent a lot of time figuring that out yet

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chao-yesterday at 11:54 PM

Talking to friends who have fought more homelab battles than I ever will, my sense is that (1) AMD has done a better job with RDNA4 than the past generations, and (2) it seems very workload-dependent whether AMD consumer gear is "good value", "more trouble", or both at the same time.

Edit: I misread the "2x r9700" as "2 rx9700" which differs from the topic of this comment (about RNDA4 consumer SKUs). I'll keep my comment up, but anyone looking to get Radeon PRO cards can (should?) disregard.

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cyberaxtoday at 12:03 AM

I have this setup, with 2x 32Gb cards. It's perfect for my needs, and cheaper than anything comparable from NV.