Comparison
Rent a GPU, or buy the machine.
It depends on how many hours a year you render. The arithmetic is below, including when buying wins.
By the Coreframe Cloud team · Updated
The two options, side by side
a machine you own coreframe up-front cost $6,000 nothing cost per hour none, it is yours $3.49/hr no GST on the books an asset that depreciates an operating expense needs internet no yes, a steady link how you reach it it is on your desk Connect app, 4K at 60 fps a second machine buy a second one launch a second one who replaces it you do we do when work stops you still own it the billing stops
The capital
What owning actually costs.
A machine that renders the way a Coreframe node does (a RTX 5080 with 16 GB GDDR7, 64 GB of system memory, an 8-core, 16-thread high-performance CPU and a 1 TB NVMe) costs about $6,000 by our estimate. And that’s only the purchase. The machine depreciates, takes desk space and power, and stays on the books if a hire doesn’t work out or a project gets cancelled.
The part studios underestimate is utilisation. You render hard for four days before a client presentation and barely at all for the three weeks after. The machine sits idle for most of its life, and you paid for those idle weeks up front.
The break-even
$6,000 buys about 1,719 rented hours.
At $3.49/hr with no GST, that’s what the hardware money buys in workstation time. At 10 hours of rendering a week, which is fair for a small studio, it takes roughly 3.3 years to get there, by which point the card is two generations old.
Render more than that and owning starts to win on cost. Render less and you’re paying for idle time. Both figures are worked out on this page from the live rate card, so you’re checking the arithmetic against the price we actually charge.
This compares hardware costs and isn’t financial advice. It leaves out tax treatment, financing and resale value. Those differ by business, so ask your accountant.
What buying does better.
A machine on your desk has no per-minute cost and no network dependency. It works on a site with no signal and on an office network that cannot reach the internet. You install a plugin once and it’s still there next year. Nobody can change its price. Those are real advantages, and renting doesn’t give you them.
So look at the two lists below and see which one sounds like your week.
Rent
Renting is the better call when.
- Your rendering comes in bursts: heavy the week before a deadline, near zero after it.
- You're hiring remotely and would otherwise ship someone a machine you can't get back.
- You need a second or third machine for a deadline and not for the rest of the quarter.
- You're a student or a freelancer, and the up-front money is what's stopping you.
- You want to see a 4K still come out before you buy hardware that can produce one.
- Cash flow matters more to you than total cost. Renting is an operating expense, with nothing on the books.
Buy
Buying is the better call when.
- You render most days, all year round. Past the break-even below, owning is cheaper.
- Your internet drops. A streamed desktop needs a steady link, and there's no way around that.
- You need the machine on site, or on an office network that cannot reach the internet.
- You run a specialist plugin you want installed once and still there next year.
- The hardware also earns its keep doing things other than rendering.
The specification that matters
VRAM sets how big a scene can be.
Check it before anything else. Geometry, textures and lightmaps have to fit on the card. When they don’t, you have to cut the scene down, and the client gets a smaller image than the one they asked for. Plenty of laptops and entry desktops sold for design work ship with 6 to 8 GB. A Coreframe node has 16 GB GDDR7.
We don’t publish render times or speed multiples for either option. They depend on your scene and your settings, so the only comparison worth trusting is the one you run on your own file.
What renting gives up.
Three things you should know before you sign up. First, the workstation resets to a clean image between sessions. Your files persist on separate storage but software doesn’t, so on a committed plan we build what you need into your baseline image.
Second, you need a steady connection. 4K at 60 fps looks its best on about 50 Mbps and still holds up at 35 Mbps. 1080p is comfortable on 20 Mbps. Steady matters more than fast.
Third, billed per minute from when you connect, not per whole hour. Preparing the workstation and uploads are free. If you don't connect within 10 minutes of your workstation being ready, it shuts down and those 10 minutes are charged. If a connection fails on our side, nothing is charged.That’s cheap when work comes in bursts, and it adds up fast if you render all day, every day.
Settle it yourself
Open the file that ties up your machine.
Your first top-up of $20 buys 8 hours. Load the project that eats your afternoon and see how a rented workstation handles it before you decide either way.
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