$71.99/mo for 12 months ($863.88) for the ASUS GeForce RTX 4070 DUAL White OC Edition, when it retails for around $600. SIGN ME UP!
“Yes but the upgrade to the next gen model is basically free because I’m paying the same price anyway” /s
I thought for sure this was fake but it sadly isn’t. Really should take up smoking and drinking again to get off this ride sooner.
Buying alcohol and cigarettes is dumb. For just $99.99 a month we’ll give you 30 whole cigarettes and a six pack of beer 100% for free.
Don’t do that to yourself. Not only are you worth more than that, but doing so would only bond you to two more hypercapitalist shitboots than you already are.
Stay strong. Spite is a wonderful motivator, if nothing else.
To be fair some of these rentals are cheap enough to be worth it.
The last time I checked, it would cost me about 15 dollars to rent a vr headset for a month!
Definitely worth renting VR headsets because a looot of people abandon them after a while.
I always wonder how these places don’t get ripped off left and right by people just making the first payment and bailing with the hardware but i suppose they probably just make up for it from the handful of suckers that actually keep paying for stuff.
Is it worth long term damage to your credit for a $700 piece of hardware? For many, probably not.
these types of “rent-a-center” businesses don’t exactly target people with credit scores that can be damaged much (it can only go so low), these are the kind of places people who are extremely irresponsible with their money go to get things because they literally have no other option.
I suppose if you could put custom firmware on the card, you could have host-side software that talks to something remote and to the card and has to activate the GPU each session.
I think that the issue here is less the technical barriers and more “the financial side doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense”.
I doubt that leasing physical possession of a GPU makes much sense unless there’s a serious market for secondhand GPUs. Then the leasing party can transfer the thing to someone else who wants it down the line, and you can derive benefit from that reuse. But that demand doesn’t really exist today. Maybe if the rate of increase of performance on GPUs stagnates.
It can make sense to do something today like vast.ai, where one buys access to a remote GPU, if one has “bursty” needs. Like, maybe someone needs access to a high-end GPU for AI stuff, but only on a sporadic basis.