Consumer cards in the rental market: 4090, 5090 and 3090

Desktop cards priced by the hour

The RTX 5090 32GB rents on demand from $0.25 per GPU-hour, the lowest listed rate, at Salad, with a highest listed rate of $1.19 across 11 sellers. For the RTX 4090 the lowest listed rate is $0.12 and for the RTX 3090 it is $0.09. Each is one seller's cheapest on-demand list rate, taken from its own page.

The rows are kept apart and each has its page: the RTX 5090, the RTX 4090 and the RTX 3090. The 4090 alone is read in more depth in the RTX 4090 post.

The 5090 is the one with more memory

The RTX 5090 carries 32 GB. The 4090 and the 3090 both carry 24 GB, and the 4090 is an Ada Lovelace card. All of them use graphics memory rather than the stacked high-bandwidth memory of data-centre cards, and all were made for desktops before they were rented by the hour.

Those extra 8 GB are the case a 5090 seller can make. In 16-bit, weights take about 2 bytes per parameter, so 24 GB holds roughly a 12 billion parameter model's weights and 32 GB roughly a 16 billion one, before any key-value cache. In 4-bit the weights shrink to a quarter of their 16-bit size. The cache grows with context and batch and has no single figure.

That arithmetic settles which cards can hold a given model before any rate is read. A seller who states which model sizes fit, with the cache caveat, answers the memory question on its own page and leaves the rate to do the rest.

Reading the rates side by side

The 3090 and the 4090 have the same memory, so a buyer comparing them is comparing price and generation, not capacity. The 3090 row tops out at $0.50 and the 4090 row at $0.92. We hold no benchmark data, so nothing here says how much faster one is; the rate is the only figure the site can set beside the other.

Between the 4090 and the 5090 the comparison is price against memory. A buyer whose model needs more than 24 GB has no choice among these three, and for that buyer the 5090 range is the only one that matters.

Over a 730-hour month the lowest rates come to $182.50, $87.60 and $65.70 for the 5090, 4090 and 3090 in that order. Those sums are rate times hours and include nothing else.

A buyer who already owns one of these cards reads the monthly sums differently, against the price of buying another. This site holds no hardware prices and makes no such comparison.

Where these rates come from

Consumer cards are often listed by marketplaces, where many hosts offer machines under one storefront, as well as by managed providers. We keep one rate per seller per card, the cheapest on-demand list rate on the seller's own page. A storefront counts once, at its cheapest listing on the day of the read.

Interruptible rates are excluded, since an interruptible card can be reclaimed. A rate not read within 21 days is hidden. The method page explains how often pages are read and what is never published.

For a storefront, that has a practical result. The cheapest listing on the day of the read may belong to a host that leaves soon after, and the row then shows a rate no buyer can get until the next read replaces it. A storefront that publishes a steady floor price per card gives buyers a figure that holds between reads.

What a consumer-card seller should check

Name each card exactly, with its memory: RTX 5090 32GB, RTX 4090 24GB, RTX 3090 24GB. A storefront that lists them under one heading, or abbreviates the model, risks rates landing in the wrong row and being compared with the wrong range.

Quote per card, not per machine. A machine with several cards priced as one unit cannot be matched to a per-card rate unless the count is plain. Say what the hour includes: system memory, storage and whether the machine is shared are not in any rate.

If a rate held for you is missing or wrong, a claimed listing can correct it. Check the date shown beside it first; a page changed in the last few days may simply not have been read since.

What these figures leave out

No benchmark, reliability or location data is held for any of these cards. The table cannot say whether a host is dependable, how often a machine is interrupted or where it sits. A rate answers none of those questions, so a seller who wants those questions settled has to settle them in writing on its own page.

It also cannot say how the cards will be priced after a newer one arrives. The rows show list rates as read, one per seller, on the date beside each.

A seller holding more than one of these cards can use the separate rows to see where each sits, and decide which to lead with. That is a pricing choice the table informs but does not make, and the post does not suggest one.