I looked at those, the Arc 1100, the w6800, MI50, MI60, v100, v620, and basically anything with 32gb of RAM:
1. I wanted an AMD card.
2. I have an RTX 3090 that's been fun to play with, but I want to get back to using it for gaming.
3. I was looking for between 30-60 tokens/second in terms of performance on the beefier models I want to run. Looking at stock Qwen3 32B the benchmarks reported about 41 tokens/second for MI100. w6800 was 18, MI50 & MI60 could do 60s but had a lot of compromises/special things to achieve that.
4. I used FitMyLLM for some spec-based comparisons (https://www.fitmyllm.com/). The MI100 is roughly double the performance on Qwen 3.5 35B A3B Q5_K_M to the R9700 (462 token/s prefill vs 239 tokens/s, 217 tokens/s vs 118 token/s for inference)
5. I was willing to throw up to $1k at a GPU; I really wanted to throw closer to $650.
To be honest, if money was no objection I would've sprung for a MI210. I also considered the MI250 as they showed up for $1250-1400 with a whopping 128GB, but the PCIE converters for that form factor don't have working AMD drivers yet.
1. I wanted an AMD card.
2. I have an RTX 3090 that's been fun to play with, but I want to get back to using it for gaming.
3. I was looking for between 30-60 tokens/second in terms of performance on the beefier models I want to run. Looking at stock Qwen3 32B the benchmarks reported about 41 tokens/second for MI100. w6800 was 18, MI50 & MI60 could do 60s but had a lot of compromises/special things to achieve that.
4. I used FitMyLLM for some spec-based comparisons (https://www.fitmyllm.com/). The MI100 is roughly double the performance on Qwen 3.5 35B A3B Q5_K_M to the R9700 (462 token/s prefill vs 239 tokens/s, 217 tokens/s vs 118 token/s for inference)
5. I was willing to throw up to $1k at a GPU; I really wanted to throw closer to $650.
To be honest, if money was no objection I would've sprung for a MI210. I also considered the MI250 as they showed up for $1250-1400 with a whopping 128GB, but the PCIE converters for that form factor don't have working AMD drivers yet.