Radeon AI PRO R9700 hits cooling, software bottlenecks in early tests

AMD's dedicated "AI PRO" hardware is a thermal disaster wrapped in unfinished software, proving that VRAM capacity alone can't bridge the gap with NVIDIA's ecosystem.

• –Blower-style cooling design is fatally flawed, with memory chips on the backside lacking direct contact with the primary heatsink, leading to 100°C+ temperatures on the PCIe pins.
• –Significant performance regressions in ROCm 7.x require manual LLVM compiler flags (`-mllvm --amdgpu-unroll-threshold-local=600`) just to restore baseline prompt processing speeds.
• –Lack of quantization support in mainstream kernels (GPTQ, AWQ, bitsandbytes) for RDNA 4 leaves users stuck with unoptimized FP16 or buggy nightly ROCm builds.
• –Despite having 64-wave support and INT4 intrinsics, the current software stack lacks the libraries to actually utilize these hardware features for inference.
• –Power limits are hard-capped at 300W, causing permanent throttling even when adequate power is available via 12V-2x6 connectors.