NVIDIA RTX 3090 LLM Cost
Monthly cost breakdown for running AI models on NVIDIA RTX 3090 — purchase vs rent, and how it compares to cloud APIs.
NVIDIA RTX 3090 Specifications
24GB
VRAM
$700
Purchase price
$0.44/hr
Cloud rental
350W
Power draw
Inference Speed on NVIDIA RTX 3090
| Model Size | Tokens/sec | Fits in VRAM? |
|---|---|---|
| 7B model (4-bit quant) | ~70 tok/s | ✓ Yes |
| 13B model (4-bit quant) | ~38 tok/s | ✓ Yes |
| 70B model (4-bit quant) | N/A | ✗ No |
Monthly Cost by Daily Usage (Purchase Mode)
Amortized over 24 months, $0.12/kWh electricity
| Daily Usage | GPU Amortization | Electricity | Total/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4h/day (part-time) | $29.17 | $5.04 | $34.21 |
| 12h/day (production) | $29.17 | $15.12 | $44.29 |
| 24h/day (full-time) | $29.17 | $30.24 | $59.41 |
Break-Even vs Cloud APIs
At what monthly cloud spend does NVIDIA RTX 3090 (purchased) become cost-effective? Assuming 12h/day usage.
OpenAI
GPT-4.1 Mini
58M
tokens/month break-even
Anthropic
Claude Haiku 4.5
20M
tokens/month break-even
Groq
Llama 4 Scout (Groq)
247M
tokens/month break-even
Rent NVIDIA RTX 3090 in the cloud
Get NVIDIA RTX 3090 access from $0.44/hr via vast.ai. No hardware purchase required.