Dual MI50 benchmarks show 32GB VRAM for under $300

tabletuser_blogspot · reddit · 2026-10-04

Setup: two MI50 GPUs (16GB HBM2 each, 1TB/s bandwidth, overclockable to 1200MHz), power capped at 145W, one card's miniDP activated via firmware + xrandr custom mode. Benchmarks run with Ubuntu Vulkan build of llama.cpp (b11325).
Key results: dense 27-31B models hit 120-167 t/s prompt processing / 12-18 t/s generation; MoE models are far faster — Qwen3.6 35B-A3B Q4KM reached 983 t/s pp512 and 47 t/s tg128, Nemotron 30B-A3B hit 864 t/s pp512.
Cost angle: 16GB MI50s average under $150, so 32GB total VRAM at this performance level costs under $300; author used RADVPERFTEST=nogttspill with -fa on -ngl 99 and notes cooling is still unsolved. A third MI50 will be added to cover the VRAM gap.

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