NVIDIA RTX 4090 LLM Cost
Monthly cost breakdown for running AI models on NVIDIA RTX 4090 — purchase vs rent, and how it compares to cloud APIs.
NVIDIA RTX 4090 Specifications
24GB
VRAM
$1,800
Purchase price
$0.74/hr
Cloud rental
450W
Power draw
Inference Speed on NVIDIA RTX 4090
| Model Size | Tokens/sec | Fits in VRAM? |
|---|---|---|
| 7B model (4-bit quant) | ~120 tok/s | ✓ Yes |
| 13B model (4-bit quant) | ~65 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) | $75.00 | $6.48 | $81.48 |
| 12h/day (production) | $75.00 | $19.44 | $94.44 |
| 24h/day (full-time) | $75.00 | $38.88 | $114 |
Break-Even vs Cloud APIs
At what monthly cloud spend does NVIDIA RTX 4090 (purchased) become cost-effective? Assuming 12h/day usage.
OpenAI
GPT-4.1 Mini
124M
tokens/month break-even
Anthropic
Claude Haiku 4.5
43M
tokens/month break-even
Groq
Llama 4 Scout (Groq)
528M
tokens/month break-even
Rent NVIDIA RTX 4090 in the cloud
Get NVIDIA RTX 4090 access from $0.74/hr via RunPod. No hardware purchase required.