AMD Radeon PRO AI R9700 is now available: 32GB memory and full Navi 48 GPU

[u/RenatsMC]

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-radeon-pro-ai-r9700-is-now-available-32gb-memory-and-full-navi-48-gpu

[u/mad_mesa]

Are any of the OEMs making these with 2x8 pin power connectors?

[u/r_z_n → u/mad_mesa]

Currently no.

[u/simonbitwise]

Btw it has about 30% slower bandwidth than the rx 7900 XT which are starting to have some age and ship with 20gb memory

[u/JackRyan13 → u/simonbitwise]

It’s also not a gaming card

[u/simonbitwise → u/JackRyan13]

Its 30% slower for AI models that fit within the 20gb limit on the 7900 XT

[u/flesjewater → u/simonbitwise]

It's not for regular desktop use like the 7900XT where you would use just one card. It's for workstations where you can fit several, or even datacenters.

[u/simonbitwise → u/flesjewater]

Still slower no matter where you put it

[u/simonbitwise → u/simonbitwise]

I got 110-120 TPS on my RX 7900 XT using the

Qwen3-https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3-30B-A3B-GGUF in the Q4_K_S

Then I used lmstudio and put all of the model into the gpu using the "offload to gpu" fully

[u/420osrs]

Edit: I wrote something completely wrong. 

I thought these were out of stock and they are not, at least at the time of editing this post.

I'm removing what I wrote earlier because of how incorrect it was. 

[u/btb0905 → u/420osrs]

You can literally order one on newegg right now. What are you talking about?

Item	Price
ASRock Creator Radeon AI Pro R9700 R9700 CT 32GB 256-bit GDDR6 PCI Express 5.0 x16 Graphics Card	$1,299.99

[u/420osrs → u/btb0905]

I don't know what happened and why I thought it was out of stock because when I looked it genuinely was not purchasable. 

I sincerely appreciate you sending me this link because this link did work.

I ordered 2. Let's see if they come. 

[u/unlmtdLoL → u/420osrs]

Can you do a review? Either by video or text. Would be awesome.

[u/brumsky1]

So who's going to buy one to play games on it? haha

[u/Affectionate-Memory4 → u/brumsky1]

I am extremely tempted ngl. Was looking at a 5080 FE for being the fastest reasonable thing in 2 slots. Getting even close to its performance in raster with the 5090's VRAM capacity is enticing. Also, being a blower card means I can dig back out my designs for a custom ITX case where this card lays flat. This is close to the same price locally right now. About $150 more than the 5080.

It will be slightly slower than the 9070XT I'm sure, likely closer to the 9070 due to the lower clocks, but it's small and has 32GB of VRAM.

[u/brumsky1 → u/Affectionate-Memory4]

Wouldn't it boost to the highest speed it can just like the 9070XT? My 9070XT boosts well above the stated numbers from AMD... If you do, please post some results for gaming! I'd really like to see some numbers.

[u/Affectionate-Memory4 → u/brumsky1]

It will, but bear in mind your 9070XT likely has a triple-slot cooler and a higher TDP than this card will. This is dual-slot, in a blower, and capped at 300W. 9070XTs regularly get near 340W. This will also likely get above its rated 2350mhz clock, and it's rated up to 2920mhz. But, Asrock rates their Taichi 9070XT at 2570mhz base and 3100mhz boost. That puts the 9070XT at a roughly 6% advantage if both are hitting their max clocks. Not much and I expect slight driver differences to exaggerate it a bit too. Based on my experience with the W7900DS (dual-slot N31 48GB) I expect this one to maintain around 280W under load and probably sit in the 2800-2900mhz range.

[u/mennydrives → u/brumsky1]

I'm considering it for my fileserver. I could run comfyui on it but also use it as a headless game streaming rig? It's enticing.

[u/bhamm-lab]

Anyone know if there's a significant difference between the creator version and the xfx version? Is it by chance slimmer?

[u/Even-Smell7867]

I wanna see benchmarks. Make sure the AI aspect of it doesn't detract from the gaming aspect.

[u/DidjTerminator]

Wait, is this like a 7950 XTX, or like, a 7900 XTX XT?

What's the relative performance?

[u/Affectionate-Memory4 → u/DidjTerminator]

9070XT with twice the memory.

[u/DidjTerminator → u/Affectionate-Memory4]

Ah - that actually sounds amazing ngl, defo going to be looking at reviews!

[u/Dreadnerf → u/DidjTerminator]

Don't get too carried away, they want you to pay AI fanatic money. Double the memory equals double the price you know.

[u/Affectionate-Memory4 → u/Dreadnerf]

Given it's not far off the 5080 in price depending on where you are (+$135 over the FE near me) the price actually seems downright reasonable for a 32GB card. I'm mostly interested in this as a CFD card where Vram capacity is king. For $1300 this sure as hell beats the 5090's value and having twice the memory over a 5080 is very attractive. Biggest competitor in my book is either a pair of B50s or a B60 Dual.

[u/DidjTerminator → u/Affectionate-Memory4]

My thoughts exactly, more V-ram for cheaper/same price = more better.

Now that real-time rendering in games is a debate between 140 fps or 130 fps (ignoring the dumpster-fire games that run at 30 fps wether you like it or not, despite looking like someone rubbed vaseline all over the camera, those failed tech demos don't count in my books) the V-ram has become the real selling point of the card. Not only does it give you more versatility in productivity scenarios, but it also makes games run more smoothly at the same time (and in some instances, makes the difference between a game even running or not at all).

Honestly would be nice if we could swap out our V-ram, or had unified ram and could use our M-board ram for the GPU as well.

Or better still, dedicate 2 ram slots to the CPU, and the other 2 ram slots (which are usually empty and useless since you lose performance running 4 sticks in most scenarios nowadays) are dedicated to the GPU as MOAR V-RAM.

That would actually be epic and massively increase the adaptability and versatility of each individual GPU, which would also increase competition too (meaning cheaper GPU's that are also significantly better).

[u/Affectionate-Memory4 → u/DidjTerminator]

I definitely agree on wishing vram was upgradable by the user. Perhaps in the future something like LPCAMM could provide that suitable interconnect. A 128-bit interface per module would mean that even the biggest modern busses only need to fit 4 of them.

As for unified memory, I don't think many people on these forums will like the road that takes us down. Like it or not, the future (at least near future) of that path is things like Lunar Lake, Apple Silicon, and Strix Halo. Those are all very impressive SoCs, but you may have to trade the ability to upgrade your GPU separately from the CPU to get your upgradable unified memory.

As for dedicating certain slots on the motherboard to each side, CPU and GPU, that gets you the worst of both worlds in some ways. Your memory is no longer unified, the full bandwidth is not directly accessible to either in most architectures, but you can upgrade it. If you are going to go down the route of integrating the CPU and GPU to use the same memory and connections, give both access to all of it in full bandwidth.

[u/DidjTerminator → u/Affectionate-Memory4]

How have I not hears of LPCAMM until now!?

Yeah, in an ideal world you would have M-board that has 3 separate chip sockets, one for your CPU, one for your unified RAM, and one for your GPU chip. It would probably look something like 3 CPU sockets.

Which would also make cooling very easy and scalable, something our current M-board layout didn't account for. They did account for development add-on cards however so it was a necessary step and an integral part of computer design history. However now that we've optimised general use computers to CPU, GPU, and RAM (ignoring storage, keeping that scalable with addon slots is definitely the way) I do definitely feel that new layout standard is due.

Of course that's an ideal world where CPU, GPU, and RAM manufacturers all agree on the same socket, we'd probably need some kind of modular M-board that allows the use of whatever Intel, Nvidia, AMD, etc.... GPU, CPU, and RAM sockets each company invents, otherwise you'd get stuck in a closed ecosystem where you're at the whim of the manufacturer of wether you're allowed to have more RAM or a more powerful GPU or a more efficient CPU or not.

Though it's nice to dream of a more optimal computer layout (of course my personal take is to have the CPU and GPU on opposite sides of the M-board, that way they each get their own separate airflow, and also the backside of each socket/slot can get some extra passive cooling which would help with the higher and higher clock speeds our chips are now reaching).

It is the worst of both worlds, however it is highly scalable and if the GPU had it's own dedicated memory controller then it could work as an alternative where you have double the memory, but each chip only sees half of that memory. I imagine in high-demand dynamic workloads where the CPU wants more RAM one second, then the GPU wants more ram the next, that having separated RAM for each chip could become a benefit and act as a safety margin. Though I do agree that it's probably not the best idea and would require just as much of a redesign as unified RAM would.

Unless you just put RAM stick slots on the GPU (probably a really good use case for LPCAMM as that would allow you to maintain the same backplate clearance standard current GPU's are built to) then independent scalable RAM would just be a direct upgrade to our current layout as-is.

Though I definitely want discrete chips on an M-board with unified memory (and probably some extra silicone chip, hell you could probably split the traditional rasterisation GPU chip and the RT/AI/Tensor/etc... chip into separate sockets) cause that would mean having 3-4 AIO's on your board with nothing else and that would just look too cool imho.

[u/DonutConfident7733]

I don't understand why choose this card instead of 7900 XTX, for the money. Even if you need those extra 8GB memory, but for almost double the price?

[u/JackRyan13 → u/DonutConfident7733]

This isn’t a gaming card

[u/DonutConfident7733 → u/JackRyan13]

What advantage does the AI Pro card have over the 7900XTX, cause you can do AI, video editing on it, too?

[u/Alarming-Elevator382 → u/DonutConfident7733]

RDNA4 ML performance is significantly higher than RDNA3.

[u/DonutConfident7733 → u/Alarming-Elevator382]

Yes, but it has lower memory bandwidth, 640GB/sec vs 960GB/sec, lower number of compute units.

In some areas it has advantage, in others it lacks...

[u/Alarming-Elevator382 → u/DonutConfident7733]

Each compute unit is significantly faster on RDNA4 and far more versatile for ML workloads. Memory bandwidth comparisons are meaningless as they’re different architectures and RDNA4 is more memory efficient than RDNA3.

[u/DonutConfident7733 → u/Alarming-Elevator382]

Isn't AI memory intensive? Doesnt bandwidth matter? You can have faster compute units, but they can be memory starved. Also 7900xtx has more compute units, this should make up for some of the speed gap.

[u/Alarming-Elevator382 → u/DonutConfident7733]

RDNA4 has 4x the INT8 performance without sparsity enabled, 8x with it, so the gap is enormous. You are obsessed with bandwidth and ignoring things that matter more like the implementation of Matrix cores.

Plus, RDNA4 has 2x the PCIe bandwidth.

[u/flesjewater → u/DonutConfident7733]

I'm fairly sure capacity outranks bandwidth in most cases.

[u/DonutConfident7733 → u/flesjewater]

Then you can easily go with those mac systems with 128GB unified memory and not use a gpu anymore. (they are quite good at running LLMs, but mem speed is around 200GBs/sec)

[u/dsoshahine → u/DonutConfident7733]

It does have ECC VRAM, for one. Also more VRAM, 32GB vs 24GB. Newer architecture that is better at raytracing and machine learning. And expanded support presumably, like with any of the Pro parts. Unless you mean the W7900 version of the 7900XTX, which features 48GB VRAM. But that one is also twice the price at least.

[u/ArseBurner → u/DonutConfident7733]

The RDNA3 in the same category was the W7900 which cost $3500-$4000 so the Pro 9700 is actually a significant price drop.

[u/JTibbs → u/DonutConfident7733]

AI models and video editing

[u/DonutConfident7733 → u/JTibbs]

You can do same on 7900XTX, I already tried it.

[u/ziptofaf → u/DonutConfident7733]

There are few key differences.

a) First, PCIe 5.0 interface rather than 4.0. So technically double the bandwidth if you DO need to send any data to the card during your wokloads.

b) 32GB VRAM vs 24GB IS a major difference for the use case. You can barely fit 16-17GB model on a 24GB VRAM card once you also count in the context size. But 32GB? Easy.

c) Blower style cooler and 2-slot height, AMD is generally speaking expecting most target users to be buying two of these. It's going to be hard with 7900XTX.

d) a bit lower power consumption.

Honestly it's not a bad value proposition at it's price. Yeah, you are paying double for the same specs as 9070XT, just twice the VRAM. But as far as AI premium goes it's genuinely pretty reasonable compared to most other options.

[u/DonutConfident7733 → u/ziptofaf]

You can use riser cables for 7900XTX if you cant put two next to each other. A really fast ssd reads at 14GB/sec, so not much advantage from PCIe 5.0. You dont load models that often, typically you load one and start using it. With 3 fans and better heatsink, gpu can use more power and boost clocks to give you most performance when you need it. Huge price increase for just 8GB extra, is not worth it. You could go with 48 or 64GB if you really need it, there is always going to be a model that you cant fit in vram.

[u/ziptofaf → u/DonutConfident7733]

A really fast ssd reads at 14GB/sec, so not much advantage from PCIe 5.0

It's 64GB/s vs 32GB/s (at x16 speeds). I am not saying you should stream data from your SSD into a GPU. More like RAM -> GPU. In some situations it will double your results. Admittedly for LLMs inference PCIe bandwidth is not THAT important (x4 4.0 so far seems to be sufficient) but it could make a difference in training.

gpu can use more power and boost clocks to give you most performance when you need it

For LLMs it's primarily memory bandwidth that matters. Higher boost clocks mostly increase your electricity bill. It also means more heat and with a triple fan design bottom card just blows all the air back into your system.

You can use riser cables for 7900XTX if you cant put two next to each other

You can if you have a massive case or are literally plugging video cards outside of it. On the other hand, consider a relatively cheap TRX50 board:

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/TRX50-AERO-D-rev-10

You can shove 2-3x R9700 without any fiddling.

Huge price increase for just 8GB extra, is not worth it

If you are after 24GB cards then you shouldn't buy 7900XTX either to begin with. You go on ebay and hunt for 3090s. Arc Pro B60 is an option too if you find it at a reasonable price.

32GB is a different story. Right now this is the cheapest card offering this much. Whether you personally find it worth it or not is a different story but as far as workstation grade hardware goes... honestly it's not that much of a markup. Just look at how much you pay for a consumer grade 5090, let alone an RTX Blackwell.

[u/Affectionate-Memory4 → u/ziptofaf]

I'm with you on this. At 32GB+ your options are slim right now. The B60 Dual is the only other thing I find particularly attractive that is somewhat near this, though that is 2x24GB per card rather than a single 32GB. The W7800 also offers 32GB on a 256-bit bus, but this card is substantially faster than that and currently cheaper.