NVIDIA RTX 3090 Price: $1,499 Launch MSRP, Specs and Buy vs Rent
The RTX 3090 is NVIDIA's 2020 Ampere flagship and still one of the cheapest ways to get 24GB of VRAM on one card, which is why it stays popular for local LLMs and Stable Diffusion years after launch. It is no longer made, so new cards are scarce and most buyers are pricing a used one against renting something newer.
TL;DR: RTX 3090 price
- Price: The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 has a launch MSRP of $1,499 (Sep 24, 2020).
- Specs: RTX 3090: 24GB GDDR6X, 936 GB/s, 10,496 CUDA cores, 350W.
- Availability: The RTX 3090 is out of production, so most cards on sale are used and priced by the resale market.
- Rent: Spheron does not rent the RTX 3090; the closest card it rents is the RTX 4090 (24GB) from $0.48/hr on-demand, live as of Oct 20, 2026.
- Break-even: $1,499 buys about 3,120 hours of RTX 4090 rental at that rate, before power and the host machine.
RTX 3090 price history
- $1,499Launch MSRP
The RTX 3090 launched at $1,499. Founders Edition. Out of production since the RTX 40 series arrived.
Buy the RTX 3090 or rent a cloud GPU
Buy a used RTX 3090 if you run a model every day on your own machine, 24GB covers your largest model, and you already own a desktop with a 750W-class power supply and room for a triple-slot card.
Rent instead if you need it for a project rather than every day, want FP8 or newer Tensor Cores, or need more than 24GB. An hourly RTX 4090 or RTX 5090 skips the used-market risk and the electricity bill.
Same 24GB of VRAM with Ada Lovelace Tensor Cores and FP8 support, much faster on AI work (roughly 2.5-3x on image generation).
$0.48/hr on-demandlive as of Oct 20, 2026$1,499 = about 3,120 hours32GB of GDDR7 at 1.79 TB/s if 24GB is already the limit you keep hitting.
$0.78/hr on-demandlive as of Oct 20, 2026$1,499 = about 1,920 hours48GB with ECC for production inference that a consumer card should not be serving.
$0.96/hr on-demandlive as of Oct 20, 2026$1,499 = about 1,560 hoursSpheron rates are live from the marketplace when this page was built; a rate marked last offered is the most recent one on record, with its date. Hours are the RTX 3090's $1,499 list price divided by the hourly rate, before electricity, the host machine and resale value. See current GPU pricing for every GPU Spheron rents.
RTX 3090 specs
- Architecture
- NVIDIA Ampere (GA102)
- VRAM
- 24GB GDDR6X
- Memory bandwidth
- 936 GB/s
- CUDA cores
- 10,496
- Tensor cores
- 328 (3rd generation)
- Board power
- 350W
- Multi-GPU
- 2-way NVLink bridge
- Launched
- Sep 24, 2020
RTX 3090 price FAQ
What the RTX 3090 costs, what it runs, and when renting beats buying.
The GeForce RTX 3090 launched on Sep 24, 2020 at an MSRP of $1,499 for the Founders Edition. NVIDIA has since stopped producing it, so most cards on sale now are used or old retail stock, and their price is set by the resale market rather than NVIDIA.
For inference, yes. 24GB of GDDR6X holds a 7B-8B model at FP16, a 13B model at 8-bit or a 30B-class model at 4-bit, and 936 GB/s keeps generation quick. It lacks FP8 Tensor Cores, so it trails the RTX 4090 on training and on FP8 inference, and 24GB rules out 70B models without heavy offloading.
Both have 24GB. The RTX 4090 adds 4th generation Tensor Cores with FP8, a much larger L2 cache and around twice the AI throughput, at a higher price. If 24GB is enough and budget is tight, a used 3090 is the value pick; if speed matters, the 4090 wins.
At $1,499, buying the RTX 3090 costs the same as about 3,120 hours of renting the RTX 4090 on Spheron, the closest card it rents at $0.48/hr on-demand (live as of Oct 20, 2026). At eight hours a day that is about 1.1 years of use, before electricity, the host machine and resale value. If the card would be busy for less than that, renting costs less; if it would run longer, buying usually wins.