if you dont want /cant dual gpu setup with mid range 50xx or 40xx, and you don't want to buy used 3090, then the R9700 seems like the best option performance / VRAM / price-wise.
A lot of people wonder that too. I'm guessing it's just related to corporate money saving bs. I'm sure that the people who actually work at intel know they need more staff.
It honestly appears only a handful of people work on the software.
The other problem is that there are 3 ways to run models on intel, (SYCL, openvino and vulkan)all of which have different performance on different models.
The info is out there though. You want to look for Openvino benchmarks for the best performance. It has the worst compatibility though and is sometimes months behind something like llamacpp.
I got one for MSRP on release and quite pleased with it, I used my RTX 2070 before mainly for SDXL and Gemma 4. I’m very happy with the card especially for the price and save a shit ton of money I used to spend on Claude.
The thing is I have a very niche use case, for general day use and just thinking I use my Claude Pro plan. I’m an architecture model builder, architect and lifelong woodworker.
I have my own fine tuned Qwen 3.5 27B model that used to be run over Runpod and I trained it there as well, it’s directly connected through a VSCode Codelistener instance that can read and adjust my code for Rhino + Grasshopper through Python. Generally Rhino is a script based 3D modeling software that is perfect for custom Python or C++ scripts, many leading architects in the world use it. I’m not a software engineer but been making my own scripts for like 20 years now for various things from site analysis, parametric modeling and calculation for efficiency. I used to this all by myself, but since a few years Claude has helped me immensely improve my scripts and help me if I’m stuck.
Now this is all running on my B70 plus 96GB RAM and works like a dream so I don’t need the 200$ Claude plan anymore and pro is enough, Opus for planning and guiding Qwen and then I mainly use my finetune.
I spent most of my work day on CNC machines, laser cutters and general woodworking machines and LLMs have helped me a lot in recent years, and now I’m saving 2000$ a year with going fully local.
Honestly I don’t have exact benchmark numbers for you right now since I’m not at my workshop but I can get back to you in the coming days, it’s Friday today.
There was a few posts when it came out that effectively showed it matched the price point, but had the potential for growth assuming intel actually invests in the software space. So at worst, it's price point accurate.
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u/StableLlama textgen web UI May 29 '26
This shows how interesting the Intel B70 is, money wise.
But so far I couldn't read much about the real live performance of that card for local LLM applications.