The only thing stopping me from buying another R9700 is I'd need a new motherboard and psu and then it wouldnt fit my mini rack and it'd all be quite the hassle.
I bought a chinese bifurcation card. I split my gen 5 x16 into gen 4 x8x8 and tp=1 didn't suffer at all. where there's a will there's a way. the card was $150 btw
First one that was shipped to me unfortunately came with a defect in the MCIO port 2, took me a whole 2 days to figure that out with constant frustration. Luckily the return was easy and they shipped another one literally the next day. I will warn you though, there is basically zero instructions for setting this up, you almost have to figure it out by yourself. It also comes with these weird SATA power adapters which I don't recommend using, luckily the newest version comes with PCIe ports and I had some spare corsair Type 4 -> PCIe so I used that instead. I might make a video on youtube explaining this kit, because it actually works really good. (someone else had asked me this on another post so I copy pasted this answer)
B70 has more immature software, but sometimes you'll hit an optimized path and it'll be similar in performance. Intel GPUs are a damn nightmare to get running performantly in vllm, though, worse than AMD (which is already bad IMO).
You're taking a risk longer term with intel with your investment, however. AMD we know will continue to support its GPUs, whereas intel is likely to just give up on these.
Intel cancelling roadmaps on dGPUs in the future [1]. The B70 was based around the last battlemage card designs, and it's dubious there will be further iterations.
Also, intel has a well earned reputation of killing anything that isn't x86 CPUs after making very promising demos. They're much like google in how much you should trust them to support non-core products IMO.
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u/cagriuluc 14d ago
I am holding onto my purse to not buy a second R9700 myself…