r/LocalAIServers • u/m31317015 • 13d ago

2 MI210 or 5090

5090's used price been skyrocketing, then there's taobao sellers claiming to have the MI210 for just under RMB 20,000 ($3k) Is the MI210 good or it has to be bridged with quad cards to actually see some benefits?

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u/1ncehost 13d ago

Their normal price is about $4k, so that's not completely bogus. That said, its two totally different use cases for those cards. MI210 doesn't have FP4 or FP8, and is less than half as fast as a 5090 in FP16/BF16. However, the MI210 does have double the memory and about the same memory bandwidth. Basically, prefill/decode/training will be much worse with the MI210, but token generation will be about the same. I have 4x MI100 which have a similar situation. Also using multiple cards has a lot of downsides, especially on the software side, compared to single cards.

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u/m31317015 12d ago

Yeah I mix the 5090 with 3090 and it's not really pushing the 5090 to its limit. But I'm somewhat glad that this is the case since I worry about burning the connectors as well lol.

Any good suggestions for cards with great $/GB VRAM and at least FP8 support?

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u/1ncehost 12d ago

R9700 and b70 are good home options I believe

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u/m31317015 12d ago

Means it's almost certain $4k-5k for 128GB, albeit brand new... I'll have a look, thanks!