What does it actually cost to run AI at home? Real sold prices from the used market, joined with community inference benchmarks. The metric that matters: tokens per second, per $100 spent.
| Card | Median sold price | VRAM GB | Gen speed (tok/s) | tok/s per $100 ▾ | W per tok/s | VRAM GB per $100 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA RTX 3080 10GB 🏆 | $335 n=122, 30d | 10 | 121.35 | 36.22 | 2.64 | 2.99 |
| NVIDIA RTX 3090 | $1,199 n=182, 30d | 24 | 158.16 | 13.19 | 2.21 | 2.0 |
| NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti | $1,292 n=212, 30d | 24 | — | — | — | 1.86 |
| NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB | $262 n=88, 30d | 12 | — | — | — | 4.57 |
| NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti 16GB | $450 n=109, 30d | 16 | — | — | — | 3.56 |
| NVIDIA RTX 4090 | $2,000 n=22, 30d | 24 | — | — | — | 1.2 |
| NVIDIA Tesla P40 | $285 n=151, 30d | 24 | — | — | — | 8.42 |
| NVIDIA Tesla P100 16GB | $90 n=207, 30d | 16 | — | — | — | 17.78 |
| NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti | $260 n=235, 30d | 11 | — | — | — | 4.23 |
| AMD RX 7900 XTX | $800 n=262, 30d | 24 | — | — | — | 3.0 |
| NVIDIA RTX A4000 | $792 n=318, 30d | 16 | — | — | — | 2.02 |
| NVIDIA Tesla V100 16GB | $349 n=199, 30d | 16 | — | — | — | 4.58 |
| AMD Instinct MI50 16GB | $219 n=82, 30d | 16 | — | — | — | 7.31 |
Prices are medians of real completed/sold used-market listings (currently eBay sold data), sanity-filtered, deduplicated by listing ID. n is the sample size; the window shows whether the median is from the last 30 days or all recorded history.
Performance is the best community llama-bench text-generation result
(tg128) per card from the official llama.cpp
CUDA and
ROCm scoreboards —
all measured on the same model (Llama 2 7B Q4_0), so cards are directly comparable.
Implausible submissions are auto-flagged and excluded.
Value = tok/s ÷ median price × 100. Efficiency = card TDP ÷ tok/s (lower is better; power cost matters if it runs all day).
Caveats we won't hide: VRAM ceilings matter more than speed if you want larger models — a fast 10GB card can't run what a slow 24GB card can. Datacenter cards (P100, P40, MI50, V100) need cooling and mounting work. Prices move; we re-harvest twice monthly.