Where are the current GPU VRAM sweet spots?

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I have been reasonably satisfied with my single R9700 (32GB) as I can run practical quants of Qwen 3.8-27B at good speeds, as well as other similar models in its weight class (Gemma 4 is still my go-to for general knowledge, until I see something better - has that happened?). But my inference box has a second PCIe x16 slot and while while the motherboard/CPU will only run both slots at x8, that second slot still whispers to me like the Green Goblin mask. R9700s are reasonably affordable still, b