AMD MI50 nabs budget LLM king title

The MI50 is the ultimate "VRAM per dollar" play, provided you can handle server-grade cooling and ROCm software "jank."

• –32GB of HBM2 memory delivers 1 TB/s bandwidth, rivaling RTX 3090 generation speeds for a fraction of the price.
• –ROCm support is officially in maintenance, but gfx906 remains functional through environment variable overrides in modern versions.
• –Passive cooling design requires 3D-printed shrouds and high-static-pressure fans, making it a "project" card rather than a plug-and-play solution.
• –Slow prefill speeds and lack of modern features like FlashAttention-2 limit its utility for long-context or training tasks compared to NVIDIA.