I bought a datacenter GPU that doesn't fit in a normal motherboard, macgyvered the fan with jumper wires, and now I'm running a model that ties with Claude Sonnet 4.6 on benchmarks, all for £200.
The article talks a lot trash about AMD and ROCm but vulkan works fine too. In fact from a datacenter GPU standpoint there is an AMD option called the V620 available on US EBay that I was able to haggle to $350, with 32GB VRAM, 512GB/s bandwidth, and runs the same Qwen-3.6-27b at about 20t/s. I would argue that’s even more cost effective.
It requires a few of the same fan shenanigans this guy did but there is no need to pull specific past software versions to make it usable in Linux
Honestly even for the prices of around 500$ that I’m seeing it for it looks like a pretty good value to get 32gb of vram. I see it says 300w on AMD’s product page for it does it have any way of power limiting the card to get more efficiency/less heat?
I spent a lot of time researching and testing different methods for that, the only thing that worked was LACT in Linux. Using that I was able to undervolt 100mV and drop GPU power usage about 10%. On my B450 ITX board with a Ryzen 2400GE CPU it pulls 30w idle from the wall, and about 300w inferencing with VRAM filled. (330w before LACT).
My fan solution ended up being to buy a 3d-printed shroud off ebay, the fan that came with it was super loud so I switched to an arctic p8 Max, and control it with the motherboard targeting a t-sensor header with the probe attached to the backplate.
The article talks a lot trash about AMD and ROCm but vulkan works fine too. In fact from a datacenter GPU standpoint there is an AMD option called the V620 available on US EBay that I was able to haggle to $350, with 32GB VRAM, 512GB/s bandwidth, and runs the same Qwen-3.6-27b at about 20t/s. I would argue that’s even more cost effective.
It requires a few of the same fan shenanigans this guy did but there is no need to pull specific past software versions to make it usable in Linux
This is nice to know. Thank you.
Honestly even for the prices of around 500$ that I’m seeing it for it looks like a pretty good value to get 32gb of vram. I see it says 300w on AMD’s product page for it does it have any way of power limiting the card to get more efficiency/less heat?
I spent a lot of time researching and testing different methods for that, the only thing that worked was LACT in Linux. Using that I was able to undervolt 100mV and drop GPU power usage about 10%. On my B450 ITX board with a Ryzen 2400GE CPU it pulls 30w idle from the wall, and about 300w inferencing with VRAM filled. (330w before LACT).
My fan solution ended up being to buy a 3d-printed shroud off ebay, the fan that came with it was super loud so I switched to an arctic p8 Max, and control it with the motherboard targeting a t-sensor header with the probe attached to the backplate.