Radeon AI Pro R9700 Arrives With 32GB VRAM For Machine Learning And More
The first official sighting of AMD's Radeon AI Pro R9700 out in the wild is now in the books after a user on Reddit scored a Gigabyte variant and then promptly posted a picture of the retail packaging. Announced back at Computex, AMD's Radeon AI Pro R9700 is a workstation graphics card with 32GB of GDDR6 to power everything from large language models to generative pipelines, among other modern AI workloads.
AMD pitches the Radeon AI Pro R9700 as its most advanced professional graphics solution to date for local AI development and high-throughput inference. From a specifications standpoint, its similar to the Radeon RX 9070 XT, with both cards sporting 64 compute units and 4,096 shading units, 256 texture mapping units, 128 render output units, and so forth.
The primary difference (outside of drivers) is the amount of VRAM. AMD's Radein AI Pro R9700 offers twice as much VRAM as the Radeon RX 9070 XT, both of which are linked to a 256-bit bus for 644.6GB/s of memory bandwidth. Clocks are slightly slower on the Pro card, which can boost to 2,920MHz (versus 2,970MHz), but nothing drastic.
When AMD announced the card, it said to expect standalone cards from leading add-in board (AIB) partners to arrive sometime in the third quarter of this year. Now we have our first sighting of one in the wild.
Reddit user TheyreEatingTheGeese indicated that they paid $1,324 for the card, presumably including taxes and shipping fees (if any). This suggests that the MSRP is around $1,200. That's twice as expensive as the Radeon RX 9070 XT ($599 MSRP), though considerably cheaper than NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5090 ($1,999 MSRP), which also serves up 32GB of VRAM (GDDR7).
AMD isn't offering its own reference design. Gigabyte's model sports a blower-style cooler, which has become a bit of a rarity on gaming GPUs but still used for some professional SKUs.
"Thanks to its compact dual-slot design, PCIe 5.0 interface, and blower-style cooling solution, the Radeon AI PRO R9700 is ready for multi-GPU workstation deployments. Unlike consumer GPUs with axial fan designs - often unsuitable for dense configurations - the R9700’s blower design ensures efficient front-to-back airflow, allowing multiple cards to operate reliably in close-proximity, high-performance systems," AMD explains.
It will be interesting to see what other AIB models show up in wild. In addition to Gigabyte's card, there's also an ASUS Turbo Radeon AI Pro R9700 that's been announced.
