Local LLM VRAM sweet spot: is a single 32GB R9700 better than adding a second card?
endgamedos · reddit · 2026-09-21
A Redditor weighs whether to buy a second AMD R9700 (32GB) before prices rise. Key points:
- A single R9700 already runs practical quants of Qwen 3 8B-27B at good speeds, with Gemma as a general-knowledge fallback.
- A second card only needs a PSU upgrade (dual slots drop to x8); going beyond two means a full platform rebuild.
- Newer open-weight releases trend toward larger MoEs that likely won't fit in 64GB at acceptable quants.
- Conclusion sought: maybe single-card is the best bang-for-buck for local inference.
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