A company in the USA offers graphics cards for rent. What sounds like a good idea has a catch, as the monthly prices are quite high. The community warns and says: Save your money.
Renting a graphics card instead of buying one initially sounds like an exciting idea. This way, you are only borrowing a graphics card that will be outdated in just a few months and can save money.
And in Germany, there are now companies like Grover that offer such services. For an RTX 4090 or RTX 4080, you pay significantly over 1,000 euros.
Many gamers find that to be too much for a GPU and consider alternatives. However, many players are shaking their heads at a particularly outrageous offer. With this provider, you pay significantly more than the graphics card would officially cost in retail.
“Never rent to own. Save your pennies”
Why are so many players complaining? Many players from the community complain about the pricing policy and make a comparison to what it would cost to buy the graphics card directly from retail:
- For a GeForce RTX 4090, you currently pay around 1,700 euros at specialty stores. Prices vary slightly depending on the model and manufacturer (via geizhals.de). However, you won’t find any model under 1,700 euros.
- Renting an RTX 4090 would cost you around 200 euros per month. If you want to own the graphics card at the end, you would have to pay a total of 13 months’ rent.
- In the end, the renter would pay about 2,300 euros for their graphics card.
- Many gamers say that’s simply too much for a graphics card. After all, you end up paying 35 to 50% more for your GPU.
However, many also say: The idea behind it could actually be good, but the execution is just off. The point of a lease contract is not to pay almost 50% more in the end and thus be in a much worse position than if you simply bought the card.
After all, with 2,300 to 2,500 euros, you could easily buy a completely new gaming system.
For example, someone writes:
The point of a leasing contract is to pay significantly less to rent the device over a certain period than if you buy it directly.
Suppose you lease a car for three years and each lease payment is $300. By the end of the term, you will have paid $9,600, which is much less than the cost of a new car.
The manufacturer’s suggested retail price for an RTX 4090 Suprim Liquid is $1,749. If you own the GPU for more than 8 months, then you could have invested that money into buying the GPU, which you could later sell and recoup your loss.
Good idea, bad execution.
Others, however, criticize that such “lease-to-own” prices are equally dangerous. Although such offers promise that you will own the product at the end of the “rental” period, these offers often target people who cannot afford a proper loan and thus will not get out of poverty with such offers.
Have you had experience “renting” a graphics card or other hardware? Tell us in the comments!
Some people also have great luck when they want to buy a graphics card. For instance, a gamer got a RTX 4090 for only 900 euros. How he did that, you can read in the following article on MeinMMO:
