REDDIT · REDDIT// 10h agoINFRASTRUCTURE

Cheap MI25 Cards Suit Hobbyist LLM Tinkering

This Reddit post asks whether a used MI25 is worth buying for local LLM experiments at around $50, mainly because its 16GB of VRAM is enough for decent-sized models without spending much. The poster is not chasing speed and is fine with very low token throughput, but is worried about AMD’s aging software support and whether llama.cpp over Vulkan would actually be the easiest path. Cooling is treated as a solved problem, so the core question is whether the card will be usable without driver headaches.

// ANALYSIS

Hot take: for a cheap tinkering box, the MI25 is attractive on paper, but the software stack is the part that can turn a bargain into a project.

–16GB VRAM is the real draw here; that is enough for a lot of quantized local models and makes the card useful even if it is slow.
–Vulkan via llama.cpp is the sensible fallback if ROCm support is shaky, especially for “just make it run” use cases.
–The biggest pitfall is not thermals or raw throughput, it is aging AMD driver support, Linux setup friction, and backend compatibility.
–This is best viewed as a hobbyist/infrastructure buy, not a plug-and-play AI workstation part.
–If the goal is experimentation rather than productivity, the risk is acceptable; if the goal is reliability, it is probably not.

// TAGS

amdmi25local-llmllamacppvulkanrocmgpuinferenceamd-gpullm-hardware

DISCOVERED

10h ago

2026-04-17

PUBLISHED

11h ago

2026-04-17

RELEVANCE

6/ 10

AUTHOR

Funny_Address_412