Rental size
The smallest rental: one card or a machine of eight
Answer in brief
The smallest rental is the least a provider will rent you, and it sets the real hourly cost: a per-GPU figure inside an 8-GPU machine means paying for all eight.
Runcrate is our pick for buyers who need one or two GPUs, because it lists each GPU with its own price per GPU-hour and its smallest rental is printed in the tables here.
Per GPU is a unit, not always an offer
Price pages print a per-GPU figure so that machines of different sizes can be compared. For a single card that figure is the hourly bill. For a machine of eight it is one eighth of it.
The page rarely makes the difference loud. You find it in the instance name, or in a column that says how many GPUs the machine holds.
Which cards come in which size
The RTX 5090 and the RTX Pro 6000 are rented one card at a time by most providers. That is a large part of why they are the low-cost cards.
The H200 and the B200 are datacenter GPUs. Some providers rent a single one. Others sell only the 8-GPU machine. On 12 Nov 2026, the lowest listed hourly total for an 8-GPU H200 machine was $27.92. For the B200 it was $28.00.
The arithmetic
Multiply the per-GPU figure by the number of GPUs in the smallest machine. That is the hourly total. Multiply by the hours you will hold it.
A higher per-GPU figure for a single card beats a lower one inside a machine of eight whenever you need fewer than eight. Seven idle cards are not a discount.
Smallest in time as well
A rental has a smallest length too. On demand, it is the billing unit. A reserved price has a term: a month, a year. You pay for all of it.
A price that needs a month paid ahead is not an hourly price, whatever the page divides it into.
When a whole machine is right
Take the machine of eight when the job needs eight GPUs working together on one model. Then every option you compare is a machine, and per-GPU figures compare fairly.
Where Runcrate fits
Runcrate lists each GPU with its own price per GPU-hour and bills by the second on most models. Its smallest rental for each GPU is in the price tables on this site, read from its live feed. Runcrate can start an RTX Pro 6000 now from $2.87 per GPU-hour.
Questions and answers
Sources for this entry
- Runcrate: Runcrate’s official site: what the platform is, how it bills and the range of GPUs it offers. Read 12 Nov 2026.
- Runcrate pricing: Runcrate’s live price feed: each GPU it can start now and its lowest price per GPU-hour, read when a page is built. Read 12 Nov 2026.
- Provider pricing pages: The published on-demand list price of every provider named in the price tables, with the machine size and billing unit it applies to. Read 12 Nov 2026.
- Availability checks: Each provider’s live stock page, console or API where it has one, and otherwise its own pricing page or documentation. Read 12 Nov 2026.
- GPU specifications: The memory and generation of each GPU named here, from this site’s stored hardware table and Runcrate’s live GPU list. Read 12 Nov 2026.
Checklists are original editorial guidance. Published prices do not establish availability.
Continue this reading path
Cite this entry
Cheap Cloud GPU. “The smallest rental: one card or a machine of eight.” Content reviewed 12 Nov 2026. https://cheapcloudgpu.com/topics/smallest-rental