Considering the R9700
I currently have a 7900 GRE, which is a great card, but I was considering an R9700. I've had the GRE for two years now and, from what I've read, we won't see RDNA5 for at least another year. The 32 gb VRAM is also pretty tempting.
I've been tinkering with local LLMs for code use. I've got the Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B running with Unsloth's Q4_K_XL quant with 65k context using Vulkan (ROCm seems kinda trash here).
I use Llama.cpp + Llama-Swap.
Other than that, I also run diffusion workloads - I2V with Wan 2.2 - and also game a little (definitely not as much as I used to though).
OS: Ubuntu 26.04
CPU: 7800X3D
RAM: 32GB DDR5
My concerns:
- Price. If the card were ~1 - 1.1k I'd be less hesitant, but it's currently sitting at ~1.4k. I don't know if I can justify that cost for essentially a 9070XT with 32GB VRAM.
- Noise. I've heard the blower-style fan can be quite loud. This is my main PC, so if it sounds like a jet engine is spooling up next to me that'd be a deal breaker.
R9700 owners - I'd love to have your insight on this.
EDIT: Well, I decided to go for it. Let's see how it goes.