Sunk Cost sunkcost.ai Data checked 2026-09-03

Can an AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700, 32GB run local LLMs?

Yes — 33 of the 49 current models on this site fit in its 31 GB of usable memory. The strongest it holds, Qwen3.8 27B, runs at 30 tok/s with a 32k window, worked out from memory bandwidth. Whether that saves you money is a different question: at $1,299 and 500k tokens a day, it pays back in 84 years. Its price here is the card alone, so every figure below leaves out the PC you need to put it in. Every card on this site is set against the others here.

Price$1,299card only
Memory32 GB, about 31 GB of it addressable by the GPU at 640 GB/s
Best model it runsQwen3.8 27B — Sonnet-class, 30 tok/s estimated
Pay-back against the APIPays back in 84 years at 500k tokens a day

Run the numbers on this machine

What the Radeon AI PRO R9700, 32GB runs

They do not all hold the same window. The weights are a fixed size, but the key-value cache grows with every token you keep, so what is left of 31 GB after the weights is how far the context goes. On 4 of the 12 below, this machine's memory is what runs out first: Granite 4.2 30B stops soonest, at 32k. The rest reach 256k, where the calculator's list ends, or the longest setting their own context limit allows.

ModelSpeedClassMemoryLongest context
Qwen3.8 27BQ4_K_M 30 tok/s estimated Sonnet-class 19 GB 128kmemory
Qwen3.6 27BQ4_K_M 29 tok/s estimated Haiku-class 19 GB 128kmemory
Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9BIQ2 114 tok/s estimated Haiku-class 22 GB 256k
Qwen3.6 35B-A3BQ4_K_M 132 tok/s estimated Haiku-class 23 GB 256k
Muse Glimmer 30BQ4_K_M 31 tok/s estimated Haiku-class 18 GB 128k
Gemma 4 26B-A4BQ4_K_M 97 tok/s estimated Haiku-class 18 GB 256k
Gemma 4 31B itQ4_K_M 24 tok/s estimated Haiku-class 23 GB 64kmemory
Granite 4.2 30BQ4_K_M 21 tok/s estimated Haiku-class 26 GB 32kmemory
GLM-4.7-FlashQ4_K_M 94 tok/s estimated Haiku-class 20 GB 128k
Gemma 4 12BQ4_K_M 70 tok/s estimated Below every hosted tier 8.0 GB 256k
Qwen3.5 9BQ4_K_M 82 tok/s estimated Below every hosted tier 6.8 GB 256k
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3BQ4_K_M 127 tok/s estimated Below every hosted tier 26 GB 256k

Speed and memory are at 32k context, the setting the calculator starts on; the memory column is the weights plus the cache for that much of it. Each speed says how it was arrived at, and every one here is estimated from this machine's 640 GB/s of memory bandwidth rather than taken from a published benchmark. There is a page on how that sum works, and what each size needs, and one on what 32 GB runs, machine by machine. The longest context is the longest setting the calculator offers that this machine still holds the model at, cache included, and each one opens the calculator on that model at that length. A figure tagged memory is one this machine ran out of room for, and the rest are stopped by the model's own limit or by the end of the list.

For scale, the calculator starts from 80 tok/s for a hosted API and times a local machine against it. 6 of the 12 above reach it, and the slowest is 21 tok/s.

In llama.cpp, Vulkan (RADV) beat ROCm on decode on this card.

21 more fit. Ranked below the twelve above: MiniCPM5 2B, Qwen3.5 4B, Ling 3.0 tiny, Granite 4.2 8B, Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B, gpt-oss-20b, Gemma 4 E4B, LFM2.5 2.6B, Devstral Small 2 24B, Ministral 3 14B, Ministral 3 8B. The other 10 have no intelligence-index score, so the ranking cannot place them: Laguna XS 2.1, LFM3 1.7B, Ornith 1.5 9B, Ornith 1.5 35B-A3B, Spark-X2.5 4B, Spark-X2.6 4B, KAT-Coder V2.5 Dev 35B-A3B, LFM2.5 24B-A2B, Flint 40B-A2.5B, Nanbeige4.3 33B. Their pages show what each one needs and what runs it.

The 49 counted above are the current models. This site prices 16 superseded ones as well, because people still run them, and this machine holds ten of those at 32k, strongest first: Qwen3 30B-A3B Instruct 2507, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct at Q4_K_M, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct at Q8_0, Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct, Qwen3 32B at Q4_K_M, Qwen3 14B, Qwen3 8B, Gemma 3 27B it, Gemma 3 12B it. Each of those pages asks whether the model is still worth running.

What has been measured on the Radeon AI PRO R9700, 32GB

Not one of the speeds above was measured on this machine, and that is not because nobody has run a model on one. This site holds three published speeds taken on this machine, two of them on superseded models the table above leaves out. They are below, as published and again at 32k of context, which is what every other speed on this page is taken at.

ModelAt 32kAs published
gpt-oss-20bMXFP4 103 tok/s measured 142 tok/smeasured at an empty window
Qwen3 30B-A3B Instruct 2507Q4_K_Msuperseded 70 tok/s measured 183 tok/smeasured at an empty window
Qwen3 32BQ4_K_Msuperseded 20 tok/s measured 28 tok/smeasured at an empty window

A published figure is what its source reports, at the window the model was run at. The 32k figure is that measurement read at 32k of context: every token generated reads the weights and the whole key-value cache, so the longer the window the slower it runs. The figures come from ggml-org/llama.cpp (discussion), ggml-org/llama.cpp (discussion), ggml-org/llama.cpp (discussion).

Other machines to weigh against the Radeon AI PRO R9700, 32GB

MachinePriceMemoryModels that fitPay-back
Nearest in price elsewhere on the list
Strix Halo Framework Desktop, 32GB $1,269 32 GB 29 Pays back in 91 years
Mac mini M6, 32GB $1,299 32 GB 22 Pays back in 82 years
MacBook Air M5 (13-inch), 16GB $1,299 16 GB 12 Pays back in 102 years
MacBook Pro M5 (14-inch), 16GB $1,999 16 GB 12 Pays back in 157 years
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, 32GB $1,999card only 32 GB 33 Pays back in 123 years

Every row uses the same defaults as the figures above: 500k tokens a day at 15:1 input to output, 32k context, and each machine's strongest model that fits, counted against the same 49 current models. The GeForce RTX 5090, 32GB is priced as the card alone, so add the PC around it before comparing it with a complete computer.

Head to head with another card: RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell, 96GB · GeForce RTX 5090, 32GB · GeForce RTX 4090, 24GB · GeForce RTX 3090, 24GB · GeForce RTX 4080, 16GB · GeForce RTX 3060, 12GB. With a complete computer: Mac mini M5 Pro, 24GB · Mac Studio M5 Max, 128GB · DGX Spark, 128GB · GMKtec EVO-X2, 128GB · MacBook Air M5 (15-inch), 16GB · MacBook Pro M5 Pro (16-inch), 64GB · Mac mini M6, 32GB. There are 111 machine match-ups on the site.

The specifics

Chip
Radeon AI PRO R9700 — RDNA 4 · 32 GB GDDR6
Memory bandwidth
640 GB/s — 20 Gbps × 256-bit bus ÷ 8 = 640 GB/s (AMD lists 256-bit and 640 GB/s; XFX and ASUS give 20 Gbps).
Usable by the GPU
31 GB — Usable memory is the VRAM less 1 GB: the margin llama.cpp's automatic fitting (--fit) leaves free on each device by default (common/common.h, fit_params_target = 1 GiB). Treated as nominal GB, like the other machines here.
Power under load
300 W (published) — 300 W is the maker's rated board power for the card alone. The rest of the PC adds more, and LLM decoding usually draws less than the full rating.
Availability
AMD's launch price, October 2025. Sold through partners, whose prices vary.
Sources
AMD, XFX, ASUS, Wccftech, ggml-org/llama.cpp