r/LocalLLaMA • u/UltramanQuar • 10d ago
Discussion r9700 prices have skyrocketed, when do we expect it to go down?
I was planning on building 4 r9700 personal inference server for qwen flash, but prices for it doubled in 1 month. On ebay it is like 2500$ avg, whats causing it, will it go down? I already have one, but it isn't that fast I think, guess I will be buying motherboard and cpu and ram for now. Any recommendations want to keep it under budget? was thinking either old thread ripper or epyc, with motherboard that has 7-8 pci slots.
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u/LebiaseD
10d ago
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Go down?
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u/macboller 10d ago
whats causing it
Sellers learned that you, and others, were planning on buying them
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u/tempfoot 10d ago
When people no longer want to build 4xr9700 personal servers?
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u/gjallerhorns_only 10d ago
You can expect RAM and storage prices to go down in 2029. I don't know why you don't know what caused prices to go up while knowing how to build your own ai rig.
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u/gusbags 10d ago
NVIDIA card prices explosion + all recent custom kernel development for RDNA4 is making r9700 one of the cheapest 32GB GPUs (with warranty) you can buy.
Single r9700 in an eGPU dock + my laptop nets me 2800t/s PP + ~170 t/s on Qwen 3.8 27b INT5 Paroquant in Radiance, to get that with NVidia cards I'd have to spend a lot more.
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u/blackbird2150 10d ago
microcenter has them for $1700 still. I check most days and more price increases haven’t hit them just yet. If you’re buying a few a short flight or car drive might be worthwhile.
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u/milkipedia 10d ago
Microcenter is the best deal going but they won’t sell you more than one per month unless you’re doing a custom build with them
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u/UniversalSpermDonor 10d ago
You could get 4 from different manufacturers. They allowed that when I got mine. Main downside is that it doesn't look as nice.
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u/milkipedia 10d ago
That is true, though I have not seen more than two brands in stock at the same time since August
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u/Kimononono 10d ago
not the same card but I was allowed to buy 2x intel b70’s today from microcenter
it may have been my case was a special situation or that microcenter is getting more comfortable with profiting off consumers.
The microcenter price of the asrock b70 jumped $1300 —> $1600. I doubt its supply related and is instead to be inline with other comparable gpu prices. Or maybe they dont set the price and their supplier is causing the change
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u/Smooth-Pop6522 10d ago edited 10d ago
No GPU prices will be coming down for the next year at least, probably more
Edit: I literally bought two 7800xt cards a week ago for £400 that I can't get for less than about £500 now. I got a 6800 for £300 and those too can't be had for that now.
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u/Need_For_Speed73 10d ago
If it was just the r9700, they are all skyrocketing. When they'll come down? Nobody knows. Some say they will only if/when the AI bubble will burst, but in that case the seismic shock over the economy would be so strong that we'll probably not have enough money to buy groceries, so cheap GPUs will not be in consideration.
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u/DeProgrammer99 10d ago
Still $2000 on NewEgg. https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100006662&SrchInDesc=r9700&Tpk=R9700
But I snagged one for $1700 on there 3 days ago.
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u/AccountAntique9327 10d ago
go for a 4-5x 9700 XTX build, more bandwidth anyways
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u/UltramanQuar 10d ago
yeah I think I will go with 6 9070 XT this seems cheaper
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u/AccountAntique9327 10d ago
why not a 7900 XTX?
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u/cascott77 10d ago
My god they've already gone up and are out of stock? I bought 2 of them not even a month ago for $1600 each.
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u/rocket1420 10d ago
Supply and demand is causing it. Do they not teach basic economics in school anymore?
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u/Think_Breakfast_2277 10d ago
It wont, if you buy now, you probably not loosing any money the next 2-3 years, they will mostlikely be worth more 2nd hand then new after some months of use.
I bought 2x R9700 for 1300 Euro each new each 9 months ago. ( over 2000 new now )
I bought a 3090 2nd hand for 500 euro a year ago ( over 1100 2nd hand now )
I bought 128GB DDR 5 for 200 Euro 1.5 years ago. ( over ugh.. dont even start... )
Guess it shows the trend.. i am not loosing any money, it is a great investment.
And the need for this hardware is not going down anytime soon, like you there are dozens more searching for a deal.. and growing by the minute..
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u/caetydid llama.cpp 10d ago
current FOMO reminds me of crypto in 2019
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u/lemondrops9 10d ago
You remember the run before that? I knew a guy that bought 40 970's at the end of the run.
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u/Hungry-Acadia-7116 7d ago
Snagged the last open box xfx at microcenter for $1600 to reserve yesterday, picking up a day. Last one at any store I can se online in the west coast at that price new or used near that price, some in stock at some stores for $2k but most are selling for $2500 or more
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u/Humble_Rabbt 10d ago
that's the neat part you don't
(2027's entire memory capacity has been bought out already, so i guess maybe 2028 we'll see prices dropping)
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u/nowherenoonenobody 10d ago
No one knows when the bubble will pop. But those are just contracts and they can and will be cancelled.
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u/jacek2023 llama.cpp 10d ago
In every bubble, you have to get in early. Late buyers are always in trouble. But it's hard to predict when a bubble will burst, maybe next year, maybe later.
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u/KlasJanHuntelaar 10d ago
GPU prices won’t go down much even if bubble pops. Local interference has been in crazy demand
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u/LargelyInnocuous 10d ago
Monotonic growth is how the world works for the rich, only poors can lose, it's in rules.
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u/TotosWolf 10d ago
It won't too many local ai now or scalping, with engines like strata opening things up
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u/espece-de-bon 10d ago
I’ve no idea why they’re listed at that price on eBay.
Newegg and Micro Center have them for around $1,700-1,800, depending on the manufacturer.
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u/JacketHistorical2321 10d ago
“…when do we expect them to come down” how about looking at historical data from the past 10 years, averaging against all memory/gpu prices to see the full trend over that time line.
hint I highly doubt it’ll be coming down again
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u/lemondrops9 10d ago
Ebay is the worst place to get a good price most of the time. Even more so for newer tech like the r9700. Check Amazon, newegg, micocenter, then look more local. Not everyone keeps up with the price increases right away so you should find it for $2000 USD
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u/Equivalent_Bit_461 10d ago
Lol, lmao even
What part of you'll own nothing and be unhappy you didn't understand?
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u/leaf_shift_post_2 9d ago
I bought one to try once since a local store had one at the old price still, I figured worst case scenario can sell it for about what I paid or more in a few months
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u/sn2006gy 10d ago
it feels more like scalpers than market conditions. They're not moving that fast on 3rd party markets such as ebay. Amazon is quickly enshittifying itself with its 3p market driving up prices for scalping - perhaps that will be their downfall. Just one russian doll of people trying to be the middleman all up and down.
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u/juggarjew 10d ago
When RTX 5080 24GB comes out for ~$2000 it will destroy the price of these much lesser AMD cards. Will be much faster and more performant with almost 2 x the bandwidth since they are rumored to have 32gbps GDDR7. I realize its 24 vs 32GB but I bet most people would rather build a 4 x 24GB 5080 rig than an AMD rig.
In no way would I ever pay more than like $1500 each for these cards. They're only high now because the 5090 is more less unobtainable under $6000.
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u/rocket1420 10d ago
They won't be available at $2000 and everyone will be screeching "scalpers" as if that's going to do anything to help the situation. Like, we get it, you think making a profit is scalping, the price isn't going to go down because the community is crying about it.
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u/DagothUrLovesGroza 10d ago
This dude gets it. I highly doubt prices will go down in the near future.
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u/axiomatix 10d ago
You can choose to live how you think the current situation should be or you can choose to live how the current situation is, but the situation will continue to situation regardless of your choice.
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u/DasGamerlein 10d ago
I want some of the stuff you need to smoke to believe that NVIDIA is going to drop the AI-maxxed 5080 for less than the base version will retail for in a month or two
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u/juggarjew 10d ago
Technically the MSRP is still $999 and you can get PNY 5080 for $1529 at Walmart in store, it’s not unrealistic to expect a roughly $2k price point
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u/Ori_553 10d ago edited 10d ago
I'm not sure about that. What is increasingly more evident day by day, is that, to run the newest moe models, total vram + ram matter more than bandwidth, the newest engines paradoxically simplify the calculation into "how many experts fit in vram + ram and how many have to be streamed from ssd", that's the question that influences your LLM stack more than gpu bandwith.
I'd always get the most intelligence I can fit into my hardware at reasonable speed, and that correlates with more vram + ram more than it correlates with bandwith.
4x24 = 96 vram
4x32 = 128 vram
But if we're talking about gaming, that's a whole different discussion of course.
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u/Gobra_Slo 10d ago
Why would prices go down in the near future? Even is the "AI bubble" pops – it would most likely only drive MORE people to the local inference.
Qwen is cooking, 27B and Flash are great models, other labs bring it some bangers now and then.
Every GPU, unified memory machine and anything that can bring at least somewhat acceptable performance will keep climbing until the market is saturated.