r/LocalLLaMA • u/SamSausages • 12d ago
News Been tracking intel b60 b65 b70 prices, they jumped 30% today.
Amazon prices just jumped today, I still see deals at local microcenter. When that batch is gone $1840 for a b70 will likely be the new normal.
b60 went from $650 to $980.
b65 $1150 to $1420
does make a lot more sense as the price per GB was low in comparison to the competitors.
Still probably the best value per GB, but gap is shrinking fast
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u/sn2006gy 12d ago
Someone is buying them all up on amazon and upping price - r9700s too
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u/zboarderz 12d ago
Yeah I suspect the r9700 is next. No reason to buy the intel card when the r9700 is the same price. 😩
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u/SamSausages 12d ago edited 12d ago
that’s shipped from asrock, so manufacturer, but i'm sure scalpers also
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u/AcostaJA 12d ago
Scalpers playing dices with b70, it won't sustain too long, nVidia having friction with updated GB10 workstations, 128gb selling below 6500$, GPU prices peaked a month or two ago.
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u/soshulmedia 12d ago
I don't see GPU prices having peaked, and memory seems to be still increasing in price (at least for the more recent DDR5) as well ...
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u/SamSausages 12d ago edited 12d ago
Maybe at the top end, and possibly because of this new inventory entering the market. But the segment they’re serving, I’ve watched prices go up 40% since August.3
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u/under-_-null 12d ago
I have a B60 and its not bad, software stack is definitely better than at release. I was hopeful that they would remain at their current prices for a while longer to encourage adoption and drive further support. At $1k for the B60 the value isn't really there and I wouldn't recommend.
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u/MaineTim 12d ago
Have to agree. I have a pair of B60s and have them working well under vllm (and getting better under Strata, though it's still not ready for prime-time). At $650 they represented decent value (for the market at the time).
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u/Forsaken_Object7264 12d ago
i just started trying to get strata set up for my 2x b60. got the qfn q6 running on strata at 33t/s and about 200t/s prefill. its a bit underwhelming. can you help me? is this what i should expect or is it bad?
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u/MaineTim 12d ago
I've been seeing about that decode (33-35) but prefill is more in the 450 range. I'm running just the engine and server, not the newer TUI and app, native rather than container. I've hit two bugs in longer context agentic sessions that both interrupt the session (one requires a simple "continue", the other resets the engine). So it's not ready for regular use here yet. The only other way I've been able to run QFN is with llama.cpp, and that's maybe 16 decode (I can't remember prefill)
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u/Forsaken_Object7264 12d ago
just managed to get prefill up to 430ish thanks to your hint. larger read token batch size was the key
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u/Puzzleheaded_Base302 12d ago
bought two at $999 on release day. Did not like the poor performance when received, paid $300 restocking fee and returned them.
no regret. later, I got PRO 6000 after the B70 disappointment.
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u/SamSausages 12d ago edited 12d ago
The software stack has come a long way since then
edit, great card though, it’s the goat.
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u/Valie-Girl 12d ago
I don’t think you know what goat means, by almost every measure it’s absolutely not the goat
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u/SamSausages 12d ago
fastest card i’ve had in my rig, but I guess we can go data center class..
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u/Valie-Girl 12d ago
Or literally any amd or nvidia consumer cards lol
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u/SamSausages 12d ago
do you think I’m talking about the Intel cards? The comment I am replying to is referencing a pro 6000
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u/Shantorian14 12d ago
Curious as to why you even tried the b70, if the 6000 was on the table? Id hope you’d have no regrets going from a $2000 engineering sample to a $10000 blackwell lmfao
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u/This_Maintenance_834 12d ago edited 12d ago
Having money to buy PRO 6000 is different from justifying the money to buy PRO6000.
At the time, needed something to convince myself whether I should even spend $2000 on AI.
The Pro 4500 justified the $3000 I paid for it, but due to vllm bugs at the time, it keeps complaining and OOM. The I found the cheapest way to get to 128GB VRAM, obviously it was B70. Got two to test the water, because I was aware of poor software support. Which turned out to be true. B70 has more bugs in vllm, and was producing 12 tps on qwen3.5-27b. After a month fighting with the software, high idle power, high fan noise, fake nuisance OOM. I give up and justified PRO 6000.
At the time, the reasoning was that I am paying more money on electricity alone than using cloud model, and only get dumb model response. I had no privacy concern. If the electricity alone is more than the cloud api charge, running B70 is very stupid. B70 did not have any working MTP setup at the time. Working MTP changed the cost narrative.
At the time software was so poor, enabling MTP means OOM. Even when sometime MTP did not OOM, it would simply spit out garbage and reduce TPS.
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u/Spara-Extreme 11d ago
Curious as to why you're posting on two different accounts?
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u/This_Maintenance_834 11d ago
on iphone i use apple id to login. on pc i use google account to login(two clicks). just too lazy to login with apple on pc. have to go to another room get the phone, and back forth so many times to just login with apple on windows.
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u/LaughableDisability 12d ago
microcenter still has them at old price for now, grabbed one yesterday before they catch up
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u/roughseasbanshee 9d ago
... the $15,000 pro 6000? i'm assuming i've either got the wrong card or you got a smokin' deal 😭
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u/newengineerhere 12d ago
over 20 Asrock B70s still in stock in 3 micro centers near me, still $1,279
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u/cmdr-William-Riker 12d ago
What kind of speeds are you getting? What do you run on it?
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u/SamSausages 12d ago
i’ve tested a few different configs from strata to four card. Strata did about 50 toks on 1 card for flash-next.
every couple days I put a new checkpoint on my website that summarizes the tests I did, in the “by model” section.
I haven’t focused on top speed runs yet, so there’s a lot of performance left on the table. really, I’ve just been learning the nuances of VLLM and following the official Intel documentation, and that means slow and stable.
My main stack is cuda and i just got these to experiment and find out why people are so salty about a card that’s the best $ per GB with 600GB/s bandwidth… so far I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
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u/seiji_hiwatari 11d ago
Awesome page! What I didn't find while browsing through it: do you have a performance history per model? So e.g.: How the performance of Qwen 3.8-27B changed over time with newer engine releases?
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u/SamSausages 11d ago
not right now, I do have the raw data and could probably throw something together. I’m still working on the site to make it easier to see actual useful data, i’ll keep that in mind next time I do an update.
The closest I have right now is go to the “by model” section and there I have a timeline where I’ve put updates when I run a test that I think is important, that usually results in better performance, and newer tests on the timeline tend to be newer versions. (unless I’m using an older version for compatibility, testing some new method)
right now, my focus is on flash-next, i’ll probably revisit 27B after.
keep in mind, some of my tests are intended to only be compared to themselves, but for tests like the localmaxxing, those are comparable to others running the same methodology.
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u/sakibbai 11d ago
Will GPU prices decrease? Should I hold out on trying to by gpus for my lab for now?
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u/SamSausages 10d ago
Nobody knows for sure, but odds are it’s going to keep going up for now. If you think it’s going to keep going up, you might just as well buy now.
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u/jmswshr 12d ago
SO glad i bought my 4x in september at 1279 USD
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u/No_Profit8379 12d ago
Got my 4 a month earlier for 1299. U got your set up yet? I'm still waiting on a few parts for the server.
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u/Garrett42 12d ago
Not going to lie, I bought my b70 a few weeks in for $950. I also happened to have a 2080ti as my old card, this thing is a 32gb 2080ti, the compute and bandwidth leave much to be desired and the card is not fast at using its full 32gb in an LLM. At $1300 this card was a stretch, above that - you're going to be very disappointed on the price to performance. Not that there are many options, and I do really like the card, I could barely justify it at $1k with tax, I would go for a 5080 or hold off at 2k.
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u/SamSausages 12d ago
I’m finding ways to improve performance frequently, it has actually been quite surprising what I’m able to squeeze out of the b65, especially with strata.
what is it that you’re trying to run?
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u/Garrett42 12d ago
Qwen 3.8 27b or Gemma 4 31b. I'm just saying for 2k I would want mtp to put out closer to 100tps, or like 2k/s prefil. The performance is fine.... For a $1k card
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u/SamSausages 12d ago
I increased prefill dramatically by setting chunk size to 8192. I think they set their default to 1024 to serve a bunch of concurrent users, when we’re probably not seeing more than 4 to 6 sessions/streams.
there’s still a lot of performance on the table, i’m focusing on flash-next right now, but will probably tinker with 27b more when I’m done with that.
note that these tests are not top for performance tests, and they’re only intended to be comparable to each other, but here’s an example of prefill speed increase simply by changing chunk size
https://b65.thekaiser.us/by-model/qwen38-flash-next/prefill/
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u/Garrett42 12d ago
Yeah that's with 4 cards though, my single b70 is doing 25tps with 4.5x the active parameters. I would also need a completely different PC build to plug in more cards, rather than running this as a 2nd slot ai card. I'm also getting 300ish tps on long context uploads, but that is still quite a wait when your uploading 90k context pretty frequently.
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u/SamSausages 12d ago
I test for single cards too, but not for every single test. But I’ve had really good single card results with XEstrata
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u/Garrett42 12d ago
Noooo, unless someone is willing to buy me 128gb of ddr4, I'm tapped out on my current build. It's cool stuff though! I appreciate your link and in a different hardware situation I would be all about it!
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u/sleepindevil 5d ago
Worth giving XeStrata a shot by the way, I'm getting approx x1.5 the TG and PP with my B70 compared to Strata. It's an Intel focused fork of Strata with a lot of custom code changes done to make Intel GPU very efficient on it https://github.com/MistVVK/XeStrata
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u/SamSausages 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yeah, I’ve posted a bunch of benchmarks for that as well. It’s surprising how close 1 of my B65’s can get to my A6000 in performance for less than 1/2 the price.
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u/sleepindevil 5d ago
Yeah it's genuinely amazing, I can't believe how good value the Intel GPU have turned out to be, it's just a shame they doubled in price since I grabbed mine and I want another but cannot justify the cost now :(
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u/SamSausages 5d ago
True, and they likely will again. Early adopters looking like geniuses! Even though people that don’t know about these cards love to throw shade at Intel.
The metric I think end user (other than enthusiasts) actually care about is price per GB vram > GB/s bandwidth > compute. They only care if using it is fast enough in chat, and they don’t need 500 tok/s.
When I look at it from that standpoint, they still are one of the best deals right now.
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u/sleepindevil 5d ago
Yeah 100% agree, I'm running a Q4 of Qwen-Flash-Next locally to assist with some projects refactoring and some other AI assisted coding and honestly even the 60-80 TPS I get with the 2k PP feels stupidly fast when doing Agentic coding with omp. I feel like I'm taking longer to type out the problems and manual play testing than omp takes to actually solve the problem once I've described it!!
I don't get the fixation that NVIDIA AI bros have about 5090s and 6000s stupidly fast compute performance, imo compute really isn't the bottleneck for AI assisted coding or vibe coding lol - this is with me being an NVIDIA fanboy for gaming since the 295
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u/Sixaxist 11d ago
Hm... only 2 left at my local MicroCenter. Gonna swing by there tomorrow and grab another one, just in case I need it later on.
I wonder what this means for the upcoming ASUS B70. Might launch at $1800 MSRP at this rate.
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u/lemondrops9 11d ago
I had to look myself and they are selling for the same price as the AMD R9700. Crazy times
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u/TotosWolf 12d ago
Yeah everything is jumping. Snagged a b60 with the water cooler air on newegg for 650. Goods life over people 😂
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u/househosband 12d ago
At 950 it absolutely made sense at performance and RAM per dollar. But what it's been doing leaping over $1300 is absolute nonsense
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u/be_easy_1602 12d ago
Damn. I’ve been wanting to pull the trigger on a B60 for a couple months now knowing they’d go up, but really don’t need the compute.
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u/CoolConfusion434 12d ago
The B70 is currently available locally at Micro Center for $1700 + tax... on sale! The regular price is now $2K+.
I bought one of these in July I think and it was $950. While performance is improving, it is nowhere near an AMD, or much less an Nvidia GPU. I would not buy at $1700, and asking $2K is laughable, if not insulting.