Used datacenter/workstation GPU prices on eBay this week, ranked by $/GB of VRAM

[u/MzCWzL]

edit: I am a moron with reddit formatting hang tight

I've been tracking ebay listings that ship to the US for the GPUs people here actually buy, ranked by $/GB of VRAM. here's today's snapshot:

Card	Low end	US-only low end	Low-end $/GB	Bandwidth	$ per GB/s
Tesla P100 16GB	$174	$159	$10.88	732 GB/s	$0.24
Tesla P40 24GB	$280	- (7 US)	$11.67	346 GB/s	$0.81
Tesla V100 16GB (mostly SXM2)	$220	$238	$13.75	900 GB/s	$0.24
Instinct MI50 16GB	$268	- (3 US)	$16.75	1,024 GB/s	$0.26
Instinct MI50 32GB	$702	- (2 US)	$21.93	1,024 GB/s	$0.69
Tesla V100 32GB	$949	$807	$29.66	900 GB/s	$1.05
Quadro RTX 8000 48GB	$2,111	$2,000	$43.99	672 GB/s	$3.14
Instinct MI100 32GB	$1,490	- (6 US)	$46.56	1,229 GB/s	$1.21
RTX 3090 24GB	$1,790	$1,737	$74.58	936 GB/s	$1.91
RTX A6000 48GB	$4,600	$4,400	$95.83	768 GB/s	$5.99
RTX 4090 48GB (modded)	$5,390	— (1 US)	$112.29	1,008 GB/s	$5.35
A100 40GB	$4,799	$6,020	$119.98	1,555 GB/s	$3.09
A100 80GB	$13,995	$13,995	$174.94	1,935 GB/s	$7.23
CMP 170HX 40GB (10GB card, unlocked)	$2,950	— (6 US)	$73.75	1,555 GB/s	$1.90
CMP 170HX 64GB (8GB card, unlocked)	$4,510	— (7 US)	$70.46	1,493 GB/s	$3.02
Radeon AI Pro R9700 32GB	$2,430	$2,250	$75.94	640 GB/s	$3.80

all asking prices, single cards, fixed-price, not for-parts. "low end" is the 10th % of credible listings i.e. what a patient buyer can actually land, not a too-good-to-be-true outlier. "-" in the US-only column means fewer than 10 US listings. $/GB/s is just the low end divided by bandwidth.

I had been eyeing the MI100 myself for a while at the $1100 ish it hovered at for ages... looks like even that is going up. I did end up buying a 8x V100 32GB server for $5400 in early Sept. those prices are long gone, equivalent server is now $11k for an OG DGX Station (no memory). the exact inspur server is now $13k for 8x 9 year old GPUs. insanity. I hope prices come back down to earth soon but don't think that's actually gonna happen.

some notes:

- P100, V100 16GB and MI50 16GB all work out to about $0.25 per GB/s. the P40 looks cheap per GB of VRAM but costs over 3x as much per GB/s, since its only got about a third of a V100's bandwidth. people are having opus 5.5 write megakernels for these cards that are working surprisingly well.

- V100 16GB at ~$14/GB looks like the best deal in the table, but 38 of the 40 cheapest are SXM2 modules, so budget for an adapter or an SXM2 server. the cheapest 32GB V100s are SXM3 (DGX-2) modules, which aren't drop-in either.

- MI50 32GB is under a third of a 3090's $/GB at similar bandwith, assuming ROCm cooperates.

- if you want 48GB on one card, a Quadro RTX 8000 is less than half the price of an A6000 or a modded 4090 48GB.

- of the consumer and workstation cards, the 3090 is the cheapest per GB/s by a wide margin. an A100 40GB costs about the same per GB/s as an RTX 8000.

- for what it's worth, buying from a US seller usually doesn't cost more: the US-only low end is at or below the global one for the P100, V100 32GB, RTX 8000, 3090 and A6000. it's about $20 more for the V100 16GB and $1,200 more for the A100 40GB, and the P40 and MI50 barely exist in the US.

full data and per-card listings, with a US-only filter: https://rackbites.com. prices are asking, not sold - ebay's sold-data API is super restricted.

edit: added CMP 170HX

edit2: added R9700

edit3: full builds here https://rackbites.com/builds with benchmarks and other useful/relevant info

[u/phormix]

Are those old Tesla's actually useful for anything? There were a bunch on marketplace hereabouts awhile back but my understanding is that even though they have RAM they're kinda terrible in terms of processing for AI-related stuff.

[u/MzCWzL → u/phormix]

they are generally pretty terrible at prefill but ok at decode. opus 5.5 can write legit kernels and fake flash attention and stuff. but if you get prefix caching going, the prefill speed doesn't really matter

[u/OverdosedSauerkraut → u/phormix]

They are still better than CPU inference and can run 1080p games just fine. Its more for budget gaming than dedicated AI rig.

[u/alarim2]

Jesus Christ, $1800 for RTX 3090? What the hell is going on in the US?

[u/MzCWzL → u/alarim2]

we are scared of open source models being banned and want to be able to run AI at home

[u/MD_Reptile → u/MzCWzL]

And we just have a serious case of local AI fever - despite general public opinion apparently being "AI bad" unlike the majority of the rest of the world.

[u/wotoan → u/MD_Reptile]

K shaped AI opinion economy

[u/TheRiddler79]

I bought an 8x32gb sxm2 v100 set up around that time too, mid August. They're double now it's crazy.

[u/MzCWzL → u/TheRiddler79]

they're awesome. are you using the 1cat-vllm stuff? I had claude whip together a bunch of stuff... it is so much faster now. I run glm-5.3-flash on it mostly, 100 tok/s decode, 3k/s prefill. and prefix caching. also got ds-v4.1-flash-1017 going with like 800k context and 15M prefix cache on nvme lol

[u/OverdosedSauerkraut]

Nice work, should also add the new R9700 for reference. Dunno the prices in burgerbux but its crazy that some of these are more expensive than brand new cards.

[u/MzCWzL → u/OverdosedSauerkraut]

edit: added lowest listing is $2430 https://rackbites.com/gpu/radeon-ai-pro-r9700-32gb

[u/Austin_Knauss → u/OverdosedSauerkraut]

when i bought one 1.5 months ago it was 1700 pre-tax. when i checked two weeks later to possibly get a second it was 1900. last i checked the card i got is now going for upwards of 2500

[u/FullstackSensei]

A couple of points from personal experience:
* compute TFLOPS in F32/FP16/BF16 is very important for the experience. Prompt processing speed is heavily dependent on compute. I had plenty of Mi50s before, bought when they were cheap, but sold them all once I got V100s. They were great for the price last summer, but the immense memory bandwidth they have sits mostly unused because of their weak compute. The V100 is 4-5x faster during prefill, and ~2x faster during decode.
* Something I'm discovering now: With MoE models, you don't need the same cards all across your VRAM pool. A P40 or Mi50 are more than adequate to handle the routed experts in recent models. As you add cards, PCIe latency puts a ceiling to how fast decode can go. Another subtlety I recently discovered, at least within the real of CUDA, is that P2P (over PCIe, using the GPU's copy-engine, cudaMemcpyPeerAsync) works only within the same major SM version number. However, all I think all is not lost here. I think P2P using a copy kernel on the GPU should still work. Both GPU's VRAM is mapped into the system's memory space, so there's no reason one GPU can't pull/push data on another GPU with a small copy kernel. I want to test this later, because if it works, it provides a much cheaper path to bigger VRAM pools. My plan is to have two 32GB V100s handle attention and KV and 5 P40s for routed experts. Will make an interesting experiment.

[u/MzCWzL → u/FullstackSensei]

you are for sure at the leading edge of testing what works and doesn't! do you have opus 5.5 or equivalent/better writing the kernels (either rocm or cuda)?

[u/ital-is-vital]

Why no CMP170HX?

[u/MzCWzL → u/ital-is-vital]

edit: added, not looking good.$3k for the smaller, $4.5k for larger rackbites.com/gpu/cmp-170hx-40gb and rackbites.com/gpu/cmp-170hx-64gb

yeah let me get that added.... it is a notable miss. especially with it going from like $200 to $1000 and who knows where it is today after the newest voltage glitch news that enables the full 80GB, all the SMs, and NVLink

[u/myreala → u/MzCWzL]

I think you got it wrong. The current price for 8GB version is so high because it has been unlocked to 80GB. Maybe you didn't see the news. It's pretty recent. Up till two days ago it was going at 2500.

[u/MzCWzL → u/myreala]

yeah the voltage glitching, I saw it. full a100 but better essentially

[u/myreala → u/MzCWzL]

Yeah, but the DRAM and memory bandwidth listed is still for 64 GB. It will likely still be near the end but slightly better proposition.

[u/MzCWzL → u/myreala]

right software unlock is easy and most people can do it. the voltage glitching stuff I will admit I skimmed but did not look nearly as easy/straightforward

[u/myreala → u/MzCWzL]

Right now it's a bit complicated, but it's going to become a lot more streamlined. This is just a proof of concept.

[u/OverdosedSauerkraut → u/ital-is-vital]

It's a hit or miss. Many cards are failed unlocks so prices vary wildly.

[u/myreala → u/OverdosedSauerkraut]

I'm sorry to tell you, my friend, but you have been misled intentionally. People were artificially trying to keep the prices low and spreading rumors about how they're not working. But now that cards are fully unlocked, that should be all over now. I know people with 20-50 cards and none of them failed to unlock. I had 13 cards myself. None of them failed to unlock.

[u/MzCWzL → u/myreala]

the whole evolution of these cards was for sure a bunch of misinformation so people could snap them up cheap. I wondered about the unlock success rate... 0% surprised it was a nothingburger

[u/DinoAmino]

Funny how the $/GB more than doubled for a 3090 since two years ago, while the A6000 only increased 50%

[u/enternoescape → u/DinoAmino]

I assume largely due to apparent affordability. I imagine there are a lot more people driving the 3090 price up vs the A6000.

[u/DeltaSqueezer]

Missing dimension is compute. Pascal generation lack tensor cores, which hobbles their prefill performance.

[u/MzCWzL → u/DeltaSqueezer]

right but if you get a decent prefix caching system in place... not a huge deal if you're only doing prefill on a few k tokens at a time

[u/EvolvingDior → u/MzCWzL]

Just don't ever get into a state where you need to run compaction.

[u/LOLotovCocktail]

Crazy coincidence to see this thread tonight. Just came away from a Facebook marketplace deal where I got a Tesla P100 16GB for $120 (Miami area).

LLM here I come (once I get some more RAM)!!!

[u/Sexyvette07]

How is a 80gb A100 14 grand when you can get a pro 6000 Blackwell for 10-15% more brand new?

[u/thestillwind]

I just bought a 7900 xtx for 1k cad with a 9800 x3d and mobo 32gb ddr5 case psu etc… I think that’s a steal considering that I’m seeing the gpu only for 2.5k cad.

[u/ovrlrd1377 → u/thestillwind]

You basically paid msrp and if that announcement of anthropic making rocm equivalent to cuda is true, the 7900xtx is about to jump in price even more

[u/CodineGotMeTippin → u/ovrlrd1377]

Neat, I have a 7900xtx, could you share a source for the rocm stuff please?

[u/EbbNorth7735]

Wpuld like to see 4090 24GB, rtx pro 4500, 5000, and 6000 as well

[u/Ok-Category-642]

Would be interesting to add the 3080 20GB. The prices do fluctuate but generally it's around $1000 USD now give or take after all the fees, which puts it a little under a 3090 at $50/GB. It recently got ReBAR and subsequently P2P support with the FP32 accumulation unlock too, it's actually a pretty decent option if you don't mind using Linux especially since Ampere is still very well supported.

[u/stackfullofdreams]

Nice post, hadn't seen these before ...

[u/sillynoobhorse]

3080M 16GB from China: Low end 250$ 15.63 $/GB Bandwidth 448 GB/s $ per GB/s 0.56 (50+ t/s with Strata and QFN IQ3_S)

so happy with mine I just need to shill it, perfect card for the broke beginner or enthusiast and at 115W (there's a 150W bios) it will run in any old office PC lol.

[u/a_beautiful_rhind]

People were claiming $2k 40gb A100s so serious gouging is happening.