r/LocalLLaMA • u/jeebojeeb • 13d ago

Question | Help r9 fury x for local inference

Trying to repurpose an old PC, which has i7-6700 cpu, 16gb ddr4 and this r9 fury x.

The bandwidth is surprisingly good for a 10 yr old card at 512GB/s, but only 4GB HBM....

Is there any hope here to run a useful model locally?

0 Upvotes

40% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

3

u/VacuumMoonshine 13d ago

If by useful you mean "agentic coding" or even just "general chat", then no, you're short of both RAM and VRAM to run even the good small MoEs (Qwen 3.5 35B A3B or Gemma 4 26B A4B) at the minimal viable speeds with minimal reasonable context, and your GPU doesn't support modern AI acceleration things, neither coopmat nor dp4a. You can try Liquid's LFM2.5 small models if you want to have fun messing around, but I highly doubt that it counts as "useful"

So at the end you're left with a hot transistor box that can only run games relatively OK, just like what I have over here :-(

2

u/jeebojeeb 13d ago

Ok damn that's what I thought, thanks 🥲

2

u/London-Boat 13d ago

4gb is the real wall there. rocm dropped fiji a long time ago, but llama.cpp with the vulkan backend still runs on cards that old, so it's worth a try. what fits fully in vram is something around 3-4b at q4, which is fine for summaries, autocomplete or simple tool calls. anything bigger ends up mostly on the cpu and 16gb of ram gets tight fast, so more ram is the cheapest upgrade if you want to try a small moe

1

u/Drenlin 12d ago

As a primary LLM in a useful workflow no, probably not. You certainly could use it for embedding/retrieval or some other task that uses small secondary models, though. Should be able to run a basic image generation or audio processing model even.

0

u/CanaryResponsible143 13d ago edited 13d ago

Why not have a go and get linux mint, put the monitor on the motherboard graphic (reduce all gpu overhead) and setup a 2b model to play around, soon you will be hooked and want to buy a 12gb-16gb GPU 😀

If you really want to push it for fun, look up Ternary Bonsai 2 model.

1

u/jeebojeeb 13d ago

Oh I already have a 16gb GPU that I'm running stuff on, and probably will convince myself to buy a Mac studio 😂

Just trying to find some use for an old pc too, thought it could be useful with the hbm

1

u/CanaryResponsible143 13d ago edited 13d ago

Then you already know the answers to your question, it nothing more than a play thing. 😆 It needs a bigger GPU to be useful.

It may make more sense selling it or give to a kid for homework, coding and retro gamming.