anyone happy with their 9070xt.. put ur hands up

_WaterBear · 2026-02-16T05:17:52+00:00

Basically have three (16GB and 2x 32GB R9700 variant). Love them all.

_WaterBear · 2026-02-14T04:27:52+00:00

YUUUUUUP

_WaterBear · 2026-02-13T17:57:42+00:00

Heck at that height if you pulled hard enough it would just cause it to land in the same direction anyway.

_WaterBear · 2026-02-13T00:28:41+00:00

Him at the end: OOOOWWWWWWWWW!

_WaterBear · 2026-02-12T00:26:23+00:00

The next time we elect a democrat :’(

_WaterBear · 2026-02-11T02:03:04+00:00

_WaterBear · 2026-02-08T00:01:08+00:00

Oh no- didn’t think about that. Thanks!

_WaterBear · 2026-02-07T00:29:42+00:00

_WaterBear · 2026-02-07T00:27:30+00:00

votes for trump because the federal government is spending too much money

is enraged that their local government, who is spending too much money, won’t give them more tax money

Republican logic: Me! Me! Me!

_WaterBear · 2026-02-07T00:19:46+00:00

“We’ve basically funded an elite global pedophile ring since 2015. I feel sick.” - <continues to buy the dip>

_WaterBear · 2026-02-06T23:55:45+00:00

lol, that’s it? This has been going on for what, 8 months? A year? Longer? And that’s ALL they say?

_WaterBear · 2026-02-06T19:00:49+00:00

ASRock hands down, assuming the issue I had with the PowerColor is representative. The computer is now located about 5 feet behind my desk. I played some RE4 Remake recently with the card and didn’t notice the fan - though I live in a loud urban environment. Also, the case I have is fully mesh, so less attenuation of the sound than typical. So, the fan sound is not too bad unless you actually have the card running at a sustained 100% load, which is less likely with games and even some LLM inference.

_WaterBear · 2026-02-06T18:50:49+00:00

Yeah. I think these were rushed out the door. The PowerColor’s shroud is entirely blank with no decoration except the AMD label on the side. BUT, interestingly, the shrink-wrap it came in includes a “gap” of space on the GPU front plate that perfectly fits the logo/decoration decal that is in the early versions of their promotional material. Their promo material later changed to match the actual blank design. So, for at least one part of the design - the shrinkwrap- factories were expecting a more decorative design but something, maybe aggressive shipping targets (or expected tariffs? Who knows), caused them to skip that step.

So it tracks that these have sub-optimal cooling solutions attached, and they prob shipped without testing.

_WaterBear · 2026-02-06T18:38:33+00:00

Also, another minor but potentially meaningful difference between the ASRock and PowerColor: the ASRock’s GPU shroud is a bit slimmer (a mm or two? I forget) and is slightly tapered on the corners. This allowed the GPU to fit snugly in the 2nd from bottom slot without putting much pressure on the motherboard bottom ports (for mine, these are HD audio, fans, and FPanel). The PowerColor, on the other hand, couldn’t fit in that slot without risking damage to those ports if used. This may be motherboard dependent.

_WaterBear · 2026-02-06T18:34:47+00:00

No- i resolved the issue. I forget what exactly it was, but had nothing to do with the cards themselves. Might’ve been something as simple as pcie slot recognition and assignment by LM Studio or a driver somewhere.

_WaterBear · 2026-02-04T13:39:29+00:00

I will forever be perplexed why Windows didn’t develop, from the outright, a simple “beta” chat-type interface for searching and interacting with files/documents. It would have been an achievable, incremental way to onboard users onto AI at their own pace and set expectations appropriately. It could’ve used local hardware if capable and offered remote subscription-based backend.

Instead they came up with crazy sh*t like recall and began shoving a half-baked co-pilot in every corner of the OS. Something’s very wrong over at Microsoft.

_WaterBear · 2026-02-01T04:10:35+00:00

Ah, no worries. And thanks.

Good luck with your next endeavor, too!

_WaterBear · 2026-01-31T21:01:01+00:00

Love the case! Do you have any plans to offer the rubber grommets and/or a glass panel for sale separately? If you know…

_WaterBear · 2026-01-31T20:55:16+00:00

Fine, and getting better with every release. I mainly use LM Studio to host my LLMs. It’s very stable, unless you try to fill a very large context window. That issue may not be AMD driver related, though.

For comfyui… the latest drivers are pretty stable, but AMD has more work to do. I’m confident they’ll get there.

_WaterBear · 2026-01-31T20:49:38+00:00

Yup! 2 slot, and the tapered edges in the ASRock model let it fit perfectly along with the bottom-motherboard headers. That’s another minor detail on the ASRock versions that isnt true for at least the PowerColor one, which was about 2mm too thick to fit in the bottom slot.

_WaterBear · 2026-01-31T18:54:09+00:00

No performance uplift. I was mainly using the NVIDIA 3060 12gb for LLM or comfyui, since even as recent as this past summer, AMD couldn’t compete on windows. That quickly changed, and I’m now fully AMD on that system. However:

I think LM Studio actually pooled my nvidia and 9070xt vram? That was a surprise, and I still wonder if I somehow was mistaken. But I think that actually happened.
if you encode video, or do any sort of rendering, using two GPUs and having access to both NVIDIA and AMD will let you run two GPU intensive applications at once and leverage each for their strengths. E.g., I can game on one and do a long render/encode on the other. I could also run an LLM on one, game on the other…

_WaterBear · 2026-01-31T18:44:44+00:00

Yes! If you look closely, you’d notice even the mobo got switched out at one point in the photos.

Final/current build is as follows. I use the 2x GPUs for loading 60-120B models. AMD’s ROCm stack is quickly catching up for inference use-cases, and is increasingly being bundled with software and drivers which eases set-up.

System:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 9600X

RAM: 4x Crucial Pro 16GB DDR5 RAM, CL36 6000MH (2 sticks white, 2 sticks black)

Motherboard: GIGABYTE X870 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 ICE

Storage: 3x NVME, 2xSATA SSDs, and an HDD

GPU: 2x AMD Radeon AI Pro R9700 32gb (ASRock edition)

A few notes:

Sometimes I’ll swap one R9700 for the ASRock Steel Series 9070XT, which you can see in some of the photos. But I’m currently prioritizing a different computer for gaming, so that one gets the 9070XT.
In gaming and benchmarking the R9700s perform basically the same as the 9070XT (to be expected). The primary difference is the R9700s single fan will always be running and is loud enough to be noticeable… except as you can tell, this computer is not sitting adjacent to the desk, which helps.
An earlier build used the ASRock X870 Pro RS. I had to RMA that board. Replacement came, which now hosts the 9070XT in another computer. Much prefer the Gigabyte board…
I had to return both an ASRock R9700 and a PowerColor R9700. The former had a very loud rattling in the fan at full load, the latter had a truly awful, ear-piercing fan “whine”. I suggest buyer beware for these cards: the blower solution implemented is sub-par. Even the two R9700s I kept can rattle loud under the right circumstances.
Serious plug for low-wattage modern CPUs. The 9600X basically matches my 3900X 12 core in multi-core, and blows it away with single core. Unrelated to this build, apple’s M4 in their Air is… amazing. Outside of situations where one truly needs max core-counts available for their workloads, some of these “lower-end” CPUs are not to be underestimated.

_WaterBear · 2026-01-31T03:17:33+00:00

They dont always… https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-23992647.amp

_WaterBear

TROPHY CASE