A40 vs RTX 5880 Ada: Specs, VRAM & Price
Short answer: choose the RTX 5880 Ada when your workload uses FP8 quantized inference or serving. Choose the A40 when your workload is BF16/FP32-only and FP8 buys you nothing.
Both the A40 and the RTX 5880 Ada ship with 48 GB of VRAM.
You can rent both by the hour, no purchase required. A40 from $0.649/GPU/hr; RTX 5880 Ada from $0.646/GPU/hr.
A40
Good for training and inference on models that don't need FP8 kernels
RTX 5880 Ada
Good for fine-tuning mid-size models and high-throughput inference
Last updated: 2026-10-10 22:48:55 UTCRefreshes hourly
Specs side by side
| Spec | A40 | RTX 5880 Ada |
|---|---|---|
| VRAM | 48 GB | 48 GB |
| Architecture | Ampere | Ada Lovelace |
| Compute capability | 8.6 | 8.9 |
| Precisions in hardware | FP32, FP16, BF16, INT4 | FP32, FP16, BF16, FP8, INT4 |
| Regions | 1 | 1 |
On-demand price
| Rate | A40 | RTX 5880 Ada |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest per GPU/hr | $0.649/GPU/hr | $0.646/GPU/hr (cheapest overall) |
Which is better for AI: A40 or RTX 5880 Ada?
Choose the RTX 5880 Ada when your workload uses FP8 quantized inference or serving. Choose the A40 when your workload is BF16/FP32-only and FP8 buys you nothing.
A40 vs RTX 5880 Ada: common questions
Is the A40 or the RTX 5880 Ada better for AI?
Short answer: choose the RTX 5880 Ada when your workload uses FP8 quantized inference or serving. Choose the A40 when your workload is BF16/FP32-only and FP8 buys you nothing.
Is the A40 or the RTX 5880 Ada cheaper to rent?
On Aquanode's live marketplace the A40 starts at $0.649/GPU/hr (median $0.649/GPU/hr) and the RTX 5880 Ada starts at $0.646/GPU/hr (median $0.908/GPU/hr). Both models currently start at the same rate.
What is the difference between the A40 and the RTX 5880 Ada?
Both cards report 48 GB of VRAM; the A40 is an Ampere part and the RTX 5880 Ada is Ada Lovelace (compute capability 8.6 vs 8.9); only the RTX 5880 Ada supports FP8 compute. On price, the A40 lists from $0.649/GPU/hr and the RTX 5880 Ada from $0.646/GPU/hr.
How widely available are the A40 and the RTX 5880 Ada?
The A40 is listed in 1 region and the RTX 5880 Ada in 1 region right now.
How much does 1,000 GPU-hours cost on the A40 vs the RTX 5880 Ada?
At the lowest rates listed today, 1,000 GPU-hours costs $649 on the A40 and $646 on the RTX 5880 Ada, a difference of $3 for the same runtime. Rates are per GPU per hour and update hourly.
How much VRAM does the A40 have compared to the RTX 5880 Ada?
Both the A40 and the RTX 5880 Ada ship with 48 GB of VRAM.
How this comparison is calculated
Every price is normalized to a per-GPU hourly rate using the same pipeline as every other pricing surface on Aquanode, and only the cheapest qualifying offer per provider is shown. A dash means that provider does not currently list that GPU.
Architecture, compute capability and supported precisions come from each vendor's published datasheet for that generation, not from the marketplace feed. This page regenerates at most once per hour.
Memory bandwidth, tensor TFLOPS, NVLink/interconnect and max board power are the same verified-from-datasheet figures shown on each model's own A40 page and RTX 5880 Ada page, which link the primary vendor source for that model. A dash here means Aquanode hasn't verified that figure from a primary source yet, never a guess.
Go further
Check what fits in each card's memory with the A40 VRAM calculator and the RTX 5880 Ada VRAM calculator, or browse every model by generation in the GPU index.
More A40 comparisons
More RTX 5880 Ada comparisons
Related reading: H100 pricing and specs, H100 vs H200, A100 vs H100, H100 and H200: SXM vs NVL vs PCIe, and The best GPUs for AI, ranked.
