8-year-old Instinct MI50 with 32GB HBM2 memory was available for just $150 before RAMpocalypse, now costs 3x more
Pro Hi-Tech’s video takes a fresh look at AMD’s Radeon Instinct MI50 , an old datacenter accelerator that is now being repurposed for desktop use. The card shown in the video was reportedly bought for 12,000 rubles, around $150 , before prices moved higher. While the card is clearly old, having launched in 2018, its main appeal is the 32GB of HBM2 memory. Interestingly, it can also be made to run games.
Source: Pro Hi-Tech
The main issue with the MI50 is that it is not a consumer GPU , or even a proper workstation model. It is a passive card designed for server use. However, unlike most datacenter GPUs, this one at least has a display connector, Mini DisplayPort, which makes it possible to use as a standalone card.
Driver modding for Vega20, Source: Pro Hi-Tech
In terms of specs, it is basically a cut-down MI60 with 3,840 stream processors instead of 4,096, but it keeps the 4096-bit bus, four 8GB HBM2 stacks, and 1TB/s of bandwidth. The card requires 300W of power. Running it is not a plug-and-play process, and it requires custom drivers. Pro Hi-Tech shows exactly how to do it, and frankly, I was not even aware of this specific software tool. In gaming, several newer titles reportedly would not launch at all, but in older or less demanding games, the MI50 often landed close to an RTX 3060, and sometimes slightly ahead or behind depending on the title.
MI50 performance in games, Source: Pro Hi-Tech
The Russian channel also shows the MI50 performing well in Premiere Pro exports and handling local AI models that benefit from large VRAM capacity, including 35B-class models that do not fit on many consumer cards. At the same time, software support remains inconsistent. Blender reportedly failed to detect the card correctly in the tested setup, DaVinci Resolve also ran into problems, and the tester notes that newer ROCm capabilities are no longer arriving for this class of hardware.
At $150, this could also be a good card for content creation. The card now apparently sells for 35-40k rubbles, so around $500.
Well, it is not perfect, but who would have expected that eight years later Vega 20 would return to the news as a gaming option, an alternative to otherwise overpriced cards built for that exact purpose?
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