Instinct MI50 32GB Price & Used Prices: Which Local LLMs Can It Run?

• Memory32 GB · HBM2
• Bandwidth1,024 GB/s
• FP16 / BF1626.5 TFLOPS
• INT853 TOPS

Bus width

4,096-bit

Architecture

GCN 5 (Vega 20)

Cores

3,840

Ecosystem

ROCm

Interface

PCIe 4.0 x16

Power

300 W

Power connector

2× 8-pin

Slots

2

Length

267 mm

Type

Data center

Launch date

Nov 18, 2018

Model	Size	Cards	Total price	Total VRAM	Speed t/s	Total power
Qwen3.8 Flash Next176B (6B active)	111.3 GB	4 cards	$2,936	128 GB	99.6	1,200 W
DeepSeek V4 Flash284B (13B active)	155.1 GB	8 cards	$5,872	256 GB	72.2	2,400 W
Hy3295B (21B active)	182.2 GB	8 cards	$5,872	256 GB	35.8	2,400 W
GLM 5.3 Flash320B (18B active)	199.7 GB	8 cards	$5,872	256 GB	52	2,400 W

Full calculation rules are on the Methodology page.

1. 1

   You have to pick the ROCm version yourself

   AMD has removed the MI50 from ROCm's support list, and with a newer ROCm installed, the prebuilt libraries throw runtime errors (the community points out that rocBLAS in ROCm 7.x lacks compute kernels for this card). The community has three workarounds: install an older ROCm; copy this card's rocBLAS files from version 6.4.3 into the newer version; or just use llama.cpp's Vulkan backend and bypass ROCm entirely, which is the least hassle.

2. 2

   Passive cooling needs a shroud

   The card has no fan and is designed for server airflow blowing from one end of the card to the other. In a desktop, add a shroud and a high-static-pressure fan at the tail end, or it will quickly overheat and throttle. Community guides also recommend lowering the power limit to 150 to 180W: generation speed depends mainly on memory bandwidth, so cutting power barely reduces speed, while temperatures drop by more than 15°C.

3. 3

   Confirm the 32GB version and your platform

   The MI50 comes in 16GB and 32GB versions; when inspecting a card, check the VRAM capacity with rocm-smi or amd-smi. Check your platform too: ROCm requires a CPU that supports PCIe atomics (first-generation AMD Zen, Intel Haswell and later), so older Xeon platforms may not work. You also need to enable Above 4G Decoding and Resizable BAR in the BIOS.

4. 4

   No matrix units and no BF16

   This generation of chips has no matrix compute units, only 26.5 TFLOPS of FP16, and no BF16 support. When running GGUF quantized versions with llama.cpp, generation speed isn't affected, but long prompts are processed noticeably more slowly than on cards with matrix cores. Original BF16 weights need to be converted to FP16 first, or you can just use GGUF.

Spec	Instinct MI50 32GB	Tesla V100 32GB	Instinct MI100	GeForce RTX 3090
Memory	32 GB	32 GBSame	32 GBSame	24 GB25% less
Bandwidth	1,024 GB/s	900 GB/s12% lower	1,229 GB/s20% higher	936 GB/s9% lower
BF16 / FP16 compute	27 TFLOPS	112 TFLOPS323% higher	92 TFLOPS248% higher	142 TFLOPS437% higher
INT8 compute	53 TOPS	56 TOPS6% higher	92 TOPS74% higher	285 TOPS437% higher
Qwen3.8 27B speed (2-bit)	70.3 t/s	62.6 t/s11% slower	82.8 t/s18% faster	64.8 t/s8% slower
Largest dense model (4-bit)	51B	51BSame	51BSame	37B27% less
Power	300 W	250 W17% lower	300 WSame	350 W17% higher
GPU interconnect	—	Not supported	—	NVLink 112.5 GB/s
Interface	PCIe 4.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 4.0 x16	PCIe 4.0 x16
Released	2018-11	2018-03	2020-11	2020-09
eBay median	$734Buy Instinct MI50 32GB	$895Buy Tesla V100 32GB	$1,503Buy Instinct MI100	$1,773Buy GeForce RTX 3090

As an eBay Partner, VRAMGlass may be compensated if you buy through the eBay links on this page. The price you pay stays the same.