The most interesting card in the 2026 lineup is not a GPU in the traditional sense. The Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 is an APU with 128GB of unified memory at £299/month on dedicated GPU hosting. No discrete card on the market gives you that much addressable memory for AI at anywhere near this price. It changes which models are even possible to self-host on a single box – with one important trade-off.
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What Unified Memory Means for AI
On a traditional setup, model weights have to fit in the GPU’s dedicated VRAM – 24GB, 32GB, maybe 96GB at the top end. A unified-memory APU shares one large pool between CPU and GPU, so the accelerator can address all 128GB directly. For memory capacity, that is transformative: models that would otherwise demand multiple high-end cards fit in a single, cheaper server.
This is the same architectural idea that made Apple Silicon popular for local LLMs, now available as private AI hosting on a Windows/Linux x86 platform with full root access.
What 128GB Lets You Run
- 70B models at higher precision – run a 70B model at 8-bit instead of squeezing it to 4-bit on a 32GB card
- Large Mixture-of-Experts models – big MoE checkpoints that simply will not fit on consumer VRAM
- Multiple models resident at once – an LLM, an embedding model and a speech model loaded simultaneously for a full pipeline
- Very long context windows – the KV cache for 100k+ token contexts needs room that small cards do not have
For deployment specifics, our open-source LLM hosting and Ollama hosting pages cover the stack.
The Bandwidth Trade-Off
Here is the honest caveat. Unified memory gives you capacity, not the raw memory bandwidth of a flagship GPU. LLM token generation is bandwidth-bound, so a 70B model on the 395 will generate tokens more slowly than the same model split across high-bandwidth GDDR7 cards. The 395 is the right tool when the model would not otherwise fit at all, or when throughput-per-pound matters more than peak tokens-per-second.
| Priority | Best fit |
|---|---|
| Run the biggest model possible, cheaply | Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 (128GB) |
| Fastest tokens/sec on a 70B model | RTX 5090 / RTX 6000 PRO (GDDR7) |
| Best value 32GB for mid-size models | Radeon AI Pro R9700 (£199) |
Self-Host Models That Don’t Fit Elsewhere
128GB of unified memory on a dedicated server. Run large models without a multi-GPU bill.
Browse GPU ServersWhen to Choose It Over a Discrete GPU
Choose the 395 when capacity is your constraint: experimenting with large models, running batch (non-interactive) workloads where latency is not critical, or consolidating a multi-model pipeline onto one box. Choose a discrete GDDR7 card when you need the lowest possible per-token latency for interactive chat or real-time applications.
Verdict
The Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 is the most “new category” product in the lineup. For £299/month it removes the capacity ceiling that forces teams into expensive multi-GPU rigs, as long as you go in understanding the bandwidth trade-off. For large-model experimentation and batch inference, nothing else on the list competes on memory-per-pound.
Compare the full range in our GPU comparisons hub, keep up with hardware in the news section, and size your workload with the tokens per second benchmark.
