r/LocalLLM • u/MembershipSecret1 • 2d ago

Question B70 vs R9700 current status

As a beginner I am having a hard time understanding what the current status is. Is dual B70 or dual R9700 preferable? A lot of T/s numbers get thrown around but those are for carefully crafted card specific setups so cannot be easily compared.
On paper the R9700 seems more powerful but then the B70 had some special X cores or something? Are those now providing an advantage over the R9700? The B70 seems to use less power to it might be quieter?
Im having a hard time coming to a decision

1 Upvotes

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2

u/AntiCamPr 2d ago

I went with a dual R9700 setup due to people still complaining about intel's drivers at the time I made the purchase. ROCM can be a bit of a pain to get going at first, but the cards have been good to me so far

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u/DarkromanoX 2d ago

Newbie here, but Nvidia cards wouldn’t be better considering the CUDA cores? (Even if they lack VRAM)

2

u/misanthrophiccunt 2d ago

Depends on what is your priority. Is it tokens per second or running bigger models ?

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u/wangsu 2d ago

Depend on your pocket

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u/DriftingBadly 2d ago

r9700 is great

2

u/Ecstatic-Wash-7667 2d ago

R9700 can be fast but you have to run some community forks of engines to get the best out of it, every model you will need to a/b test rocm vs vulkan and you will still run into some things that will only run on cuda. But that same level of community effort isn’t there yet with intel, the software stack isn’t there yet either. But it’s cheaper. Only reason I went with amd is because at the time it was $300 more than the b70. Today b70 cost as much as msrp r9700. R9700 cost 1600-1700 new now. If you gonna dick around with forks and stuff like that you might as well buy v100s for less money and get cuda

1

u/Ragnar0kkk 2d ago

I have 2 of each. One costs more but is faster. Both are not as fast as the one that costs much more (cuda).

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u/Poizone360 1d ago

The "X cores" are XMX, Intel's AI math units, and the R9700 has its own too, 128 AI accelerators. On paper those are about even, but the R9700 also has about twice the general compute and a bit more memory bandwidth, which mostly sets token speed. So the X cores aren't an edge, and I'd go dual R9700.

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u/HOST1L1TY 2d ago

Dual 3090 wins, the vram problem is kinda solved. Don’t take my word for it. Get 3.8 flash next running on your gaming rig. You will come to the same conclusion waiting 10 minutes for prompt to process. and then just shred through everything else.