ASRock Creator Radeon AI Pro R9700 Review: Workstation Inference, AMD Style

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Thanks to the explosion in demand for AI inference hardware, high-end video cards have become a hot commodity in the PC parts market. This spike has affected video cards at almost every level, but it has hit workstation-grade cards hardest. The crème de la crème of cards, and, importantly, the ones that ship with the most VRAM, have been hit hardest. NVIDIA, AMD, and even Intel have felt this spike in demand, as discrete video cards have become the most effective way to add high-performance inference hardware to a standard-form-factor PC.
As part of our overall look at AI inference hardware and performance here at ServeTheHome, we have covered everything from mini-PCs to server-grade hardware, but not much in between. So today we are taking a look at that middle with a Radeon Pro AI workstation card from ASRock, their Creator Radeon AI Pro R9700. This is the fastest and best-equipped tier of workstation cards from AMD’s current-generation RDNA 4 architecture family.
The Radeon AI Pro R9700 is the latest in AMD’s long-running line of workstation cards. While it is a video card through and through, with cutting-edge graphics features and numerous display outputs, AMD knew where the market was headed when it released its latest generation of workstation cards and named them accordingly, putting AI capabilities front and center. The underlying architecture reflects that, with RDNA 4 adding a slew of AI-centric upgrades, including faster matrix math performance and support for lower-precision formats down to FP8. As a result, the R9700 is AMD’s most AI-capable workstation video card yet, and has arrived at a time when those capabilities are in very high demand.
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ASRock Creator Radeon Pro AI R9700 Hardware Overview
As AMD is not selling their own reference design workstation cards for this generation, it falls to AMD’s partners to sell the cards instead. This production strategy is familiar to AMD on the consumer side, but it is a bit more unusual for a workstation card.
Most notably, AMD has kept its Radeon Pro partners on a rather short leash with card designs. AMD is curating a very specific image for a very specific market, chief among them the ability to install multiple cards in a single workstation. As a result, though AMD isn’t selling its reference card, its partner cards are all quite similar in high-level design: dual-slot blowers, a form factor you will not readily find outside workstation cards these days.
That brings us to ASRock’s Creator Radeon Pro AI R9700. ASRock has been a long-time partner of AMD’s at every level, from client and workstation motherboards to video cards. So it is not surprising to see them get into workstation video cards as well, now that AMD is offering that option to its closest partners.
ASRock’s R9700 card is, in all practicality, exactly what you would expect from a workstation card given the form factor and AMD’s constraints. This dual-slot video card follows the PCIe specifications to a T in width and height to ensure it (and perhaps a few of its friends) fits in a workstation chassis.
Under the hood, the card uses AMD’s Navi 48 GPU, the most powerful RDNA 4 GPU in this generation. The GPU offers 64 of AMD’s CUs, which in turn are comprised of a total of 4096 shading units for vector math and 128 AI accelerator cores for matrix operations.
Notably, AMD does not include discrete matrix math cores in the RDNA architecture as it does in its CDNA architecture. Instead, AMD relies on Wave Matrix Multiply-Accumulate (WMMA) for matrix operations, which run on the same CUs that make up the vector unit. Consequently, while these CU-integrated AI accelerators are not quite like the matrix hardware on AMD’s server-grade hardware, they are no slouch, either. Especially after AMD doubled its floating-point performance (and quadrupled its INT8 performance) coming from RDNA 3 to RDNA 4.
With a peak clock speed of 2.92GHz, the R9700 delivers 382.7 TFLOPS of peak matrix math throughput with dense FP8 math, or double that with sparsity. One key improvement in this generation of RDNA architecture is added FP8 support, which not only boosts the card’s compute throughput but also better aligns AMD’s hardware with the industry trend toward lower-precision weights. While the card does not support faster execution of even lower precisions such as FP6 and FP4, it still supports them, as they are processed at FP8. The bigger benefit is that it still allows smaller weights and thus larger model parameter counts, making the most of the card’s 32GB of VRAM. The most typical example is to use FP6 weights to get a ~30B parameter model working on a 32GB card with some VRAM space to spare.
As is traditional for a workstation card, AMD and ASRock packed the R9700 with as much memory as the card can handle. With Navi 48 sporting a 256-bit bus, the card has 32GB of GDDR6 memory organized as 16 2Gbit chips in clamshell mode, meaning chips on the front and back of the card. Above all else, memory support is a key differentiator between AMD’s consumer and professional cards, so you will find 32 GB only on the Radeon AI Pro cards.
Patrick’s note: At an Advancing AI 2025 event, I asked AMD why the R9700 only had 32 GB. They looked at me like, why would you want more, since that is the max the memory configuration supports. My feedback was it might cost a lot more, but the market would probably absorb a higher cost and higher memory part for AI. I still wish AMD had something between this and the MI350P.
The GDDR6 memory clocks at 20Gbps, giving the card a total of 640GB/second of memory bandwidth. Meanwhile, as a workstation card, the R9700 has another ace up its sleeve: ECC support. This is implemented as soft ECC and is only available under Linux (and even then, it must be manually enabled), but it adds an extra layer of reliability for systems and racks built around the card. Again, with the ability to install up to 4 in standard ATX systems, the need for reliability increases because the odds of failure rise, so it is not just a checkbox feature.
Navi 48 sits somewhere between a mid- to high-end GPU in die size (357mm2) and transistor count (53.9B), which makes it a bit of an oddity in AMD’s lineup as far as card progression goes. AMD did not produce a true high-end GPU this generation, and as a result, the R9700 actually has less VRAM than the previous-generation 48GB Radeon Pro W7900. This means it is a step back in overall memory capacity, but AMD is looking to make up the difference with compute throughput, thanks in large part to the newer chip architecture.
One advantage of being a smaller chip, however, is that it keeps TDPs in check. AMD (and ASRock’s) Total Board Power figure for the card is just 300 Watts, which makes it relatively easy to cool a blower-style card without a noise blowout. This also means that even 4 cards in a system is not going to result in excessive power requirements, though it will certainly be pushing the limits of a single power supply.
ASRock Creator Radeon Pro AI R9700 Build and Design
As for video card design, ASRock’s Creator Radeon AI Pro R9700 is a typical dual-slot blower design. To ensure the card can be installed in multiples, ASRock has kept things tightly tuned to PCIe specifications, with a dual-slot card measuring 10.7 inches long and 4.4 inches high.
Interestingly, the blower design here is open-backed, meaning the back side of the card has open vents so it can pull in air from both sides.
The fan itself is a pretty typical blower design. A single radial blower sits at the rear of the card, pushing cool air over the heatsink and toward the card’s PCIe bracket, where a large vent exhausts the resulting hot air. According to ASRock, it uses a vapor chamber to efficiently pull heat from the Navi 48 GPU, with a layer of Honeywell’s PTM7950 as the thermal interface material between the GPU and cooler.
Focusing on the rear of the card, we can better see the venting cut into the card’s PCB and its shroud. We can also see that the card has a shroud on its back side. As noted earlier, the 32GB of GDDR6 is organized in a clamshell configuration on the R9700, meaning 8 chips are on the rear of the card and need protection and cooling, just like the chips on the front side.
Since this is a workstation card, ASRock has also put thought into its power connector placement. The Creator R9700 uses an ATX 12V-2×6 connector, placed on the rear of the card instead of the top, another workstation-centric design element that makes it easier to install multiple cards in a system. The 12V-2×6 connector is rated for up to 600W, so the 300W TBP R9700 is well within the cable’s limits.
Meanwhile, at the front of the card, you will find a not-too-subtle reminder that this is a video card, with 4 display outputs, the maximum the Navi 48 GPU can drive. Unique among R9700 vendors, ASRock went with an all-DisplayPort configuration, forgoing the usual HDMI port for a fourth DisplayPort. All DisplayPorts are DisplayPort 2.1a, and with DSC, the card can drive displays up to 12 K.
Otherwise, aside from the display outputs, the rest of the front of the card is almost entirely vent cutouts. 300W is still a lot of heat for a blower card, so ASRock does not hold back, and you can clearly see the heatsink fins running through the card.
With our hardware tour complete, let us take a look at the performance of the Creator R9700.

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