WHAT THIS CARD IS WORTH
Radeon HD 8970 OEM holds 81 of the models in our catalogue and is, in practice, a Q4_K_M card — the largest it takes is Falcon3-3B at Q4_K_M.
TOKENS/SEC PER $100
—
8B at Q4_K_M, so cards compare like for like
VRAM PER $100
—
what memory costs on this card
THE BIGGEST IT TAKES
AGAINST CARDS OF SIMILAR MEMORY
Radeon HD 8970 OEM3 GB——
Neighbours in memory rather than in price: memory decides whether a card can do the job at all, so two cards of the same size at different prices is the comparison you are making. Ordered by memory, then bandwidth — not by the value column, which is worked out from bandwidth and price alone and therefore rewards a cheap card whatever its software stack does to that bandwidth in practice. Read it as one input, not as a ranking.
▸ DEVICE UNDER TEST
AMD Radeon HD 8970 OEM — 3 GB VRAM.
▸ RADEON HD 8970 OEM SPEC
- BRAND
- AMD
- VRAM
- 3 GB GDDR5
- BANDWIDTH
- 264 GB/s
- FP16 COMPUTE
- 3.8 TFLOPS
- FP32 COMPUTE
- 3.8 TFLOPS
- STREAM PROCESSORS
- 2,048
- TDP
- 250 W
- ARCHITECTURE
- GCN 1.0
▸ AI CAPABILITY
81/ 449 models @ Q4
With 3 GB VRAM and 264 GB/s bandwidth, this GPU handles models up to 3.1B parameters.
Speed ≈ bandwidth / model_size × efficiency. A 7B model at Q4 runs at ~30 tok/s.
§ 01TOP MODELS FOR RADEON HD 8970 OEM
81 FIT · SHOWING 20| MODEL | SIZE | VRAM Q4 | TOK/S | AVG |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen 2.5 3B | 3.1B | 2.4 GB | 76 | 37.2 |
| SmolLM3-3B | 3.1B | 2.4 GB | 76 | 30.5 |
| Ministral 3B | 3B | 2.3 GB | 78 | 29.6 |
| StarCoder2 3B | 3B | 2.3 GB | 78 | 9.5 |
| Granite 4.1 3B | 3B | 2.3 GB | 78 | 16.6 |
| xLAM-2 3B Function-Calling | 3B | 2.3 GB | 78 | — |
| Jamba 2 3B | 3B | 2.3 GB | 78 | — |
| Dolly v2 3B | 2.8B | 2.2 GB | 84 | 5.6 |
| StableLM Zephyr 3B | 2.79B | 2.2 GB | 84 | 14.9 |
| Zephyr 3B | 2.79B | 2.2 GB | 84 | 14.4 |
| OPT 2.7B | 2.7B | 2.1 GB | 87 | 28.0 |
| Phi-2 2.7B | 2.7B | 2.1 GB | 87 | 24.1 |
| Zamba2 2.7B | 2.7B | 2.1 GB | 87 | 48.0 |
| Granite 3.0 2B | 2.63B | 2.1 GB | 89 | 35.8 |
| gemma-2-2b | 2.6B | 2.1 GB | 90 | 22.9 |
| LFM2 2.6B | 2.6B | 2.1 GB | 90 | 16.3 |
| Granite 3.1 2B | 2.53B | 2.0 GB | 93 | 37.8 |
| Granite 3.3 2B | 2.53B | 2.0 GB | 93 | 20.5 |
| Gemma 1 2B | 2.51B | 2.0 GB | 93 | 20.2 |
| CodeGemma 2B | 2.51B | 2.0 GB | 93 | 22.9 |