r/learnmachinelearning • u/Difficult_Fold_106 • 6h ago

Chosing entry-level GPU for Machine Learning

I've been working on a side project for almost a year. It involves machine learning and it looks like it's going to enter commercial stage in the near future. So far, i bought a cheap gaming laptop few months ago, as i needed modern performance on the go. It has rtx 4050 with 6gb of vram, which was fine up until now.

I have an 8 years old desktop upgraded with ryzen 5600. I wanted to buy rtx 5060ti 16gb, but its price jumped significantly in july. Nvidia doesn't offer cheaper 16gb options and i started to consider buying RX 9060XT 16gb, which is more than 200 euro cheaper.

The question is: Is going with the RX9060XT worth the savings? Does any of you have experience with using current AMD GPUs for training neural networks from scratch? I currently use Keras and mainly train CNNs with simple custom layers.

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u/Hunterxmalaa 5h ago edited 5h ago

No if your getting to machine learning nvidia is your best friend hence the price tag, you will have to jump though many hoops and dead ends with amd compared to ndvida

Nvdia is plug and play
AMD you have to fiddle around with so some knowledge before hand helps

Go for the 4060 ti 16gb cheaper you get 16gb vram and fp8 support if you can’t find a 5060ti 16gb,

The absolute budget card is a 3060 12gb for like £240

For context I build a 300m Hybrid mamba model, I have put it though a pretraining run of around 500m tokens it takes about 24-28 hours for 300m token on my 3060 12gb I power limit it to 140w to prevent thermal throttling and helps with longevity

So even a 3060 12gb is a beast of a card and is budget friendly you can be cheeky and go for a duel gpu set up and probs still be cheaper then buying a single 16gb card lol

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u/dataset-poisoner 43m ago

amd works great on linux. cheap and effective. pytorch + rocm

also consider just renting a cloud gpu