Radeon RX 7900 XTX
The cheapest way to 24GB of VRAM in a card you can still buy new.
Average in-stock listing $1,542 on Sep 26, 2026 (lowest $1,120), 1.5 times the $999 launch MSRP. See its price history. The links open live listings. Amazon links may earn us a commission.
Will it run your models?
VRAM meterLocal AI fit: 32B-class models. Rule of thumb for 4-bit quantized models; context length and other apps eat into the same memory.
Open models that fit comfortably at Q4
- DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B 32.8B · 18.3 GiB · headroom 4.2 GiB
- Qwen3 32B 32.8B · 18.3 GiB · headroom 4.2 GiB
- Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct 32.5B · 18.2 GiB · headroom 4.3 GiB
- Gemma 4 31B IT 31.3B · 17.5 GiB · headroom 5.0 GiB
- Qwen3 30B-A3B 30.5B · 17.0 GiB · headroom 5.5 GiB
- GLM-4.7-Flash 30B · 16.8 GiB · headroom 5.7 GiB
- Qwen3.6 27B 27.8B · 15.5 GiB · headroom 7.0 GiB
- Gemma 3 27B IT 27.4B · 15.3 GiB · headroom 7.2 GiB
Tight but possible: Qwen3.6 35B-A3B.
What it costs to run
355W of board power, 4 hours a day under load, priced at the residential electricity rate where you live. Pick a state and the numbers update.
Board power is the rated maximum; real gaming load usually sits below it and idle is a few watts, so treat this as the ceiling. Rates: EIA residential average, May 2026. See every card ranked by running cost →
Why you buy it
- 24GB VRAM for under $1,000
- Excellent 4K raster performance
- Well supported by llama.cpp and Ollama
Why you hesitate
- Ray tracing well behind NVIDIA
- CUDA-only tools lock it out
- 355W and runs warm
The editor's take
Still a very fast 4K raster card, and the only sub-$1,000 path to 24GB that is not a used listing. Ollama and llama.cpp run well on it now, so the local AI story is real if your stack is inference rather than training. Ray tracing and the broader CUDA world remain the trade-offs. Discounted units make this the sleeper value in the whole catalog.
Decided?
Live listings for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, straight from the retailers.
Average in-stock listing $1,542 on Sep 26, 2026 (lowest $1,120), 1.5 times the $999 launch MSRP. See its price history. Amazon links may earn us a commission.