I see it at $770/GPU, or $48/1GB vram

That probably is the cheapest per 1 GB vram right now. However, the R9700 a few months ago was only $1350/32GB or $42/1GB VRAM. And everyone knew it, because the card is now $1800 or so with supply issues.

I think the market discovered the reasonable min is 32GB. That runs Qwen3.8 Q6 with 100k+ context all in vram. 24GB does not.