COMPARE / L4 VS L40S
L4 vs L40S
Specs from the chip makers' datasheets; prices from the live Compute Cafe panel, refreshed hourly. Every rate is an on-demand published price with a source receipt.
CHEAPEST L4
$0.080/hr
SpotGPUs · median $0.70 · 26 providers
CHEAPEST L40S
$0.250/hr
SpotGPUs · median $1.39 · 48 providers
CHEAPER RIGHT NOW
L4
live panel, 2026-09-27
| L4 | L40S | |
|---|---|---|
| MAKER | NVIDIA | NVIDIA |
| ARCHITECTURE | Ada Lovelace | Ada Lovelace |
| LAUNCHED | 2023 | 2023 |
| MEMORY | 24 GB GDDR6 | 48 GB GDDR6 ECC |
| MEMORY BANDWIDTH | 300 GB/s | 864 GB/s |
| TENSOR COMPUTE | 121 TFLOPS FP16 tensor dense (242 sparse); 242 TOPS INT8 dense | 362 TFLOPS FP16/BF16 tensor dense (733 sparse); 733 TFLOPS FP8 dense |
| POWER DRAW | 72 W | 350 W |
| INTERCONNECT | PCIe 4.0 x16 | PCIe 4.0 x16 (no NVLink) |
HOW TO CHOOSE
L4 vs L40S
Triple the compute and double the memory at 5x the power and price. L4 for scale-out small models, L40S for bigger single models.
Workload fit
L4: small-model serving, video pipelines, edge and burst inference. L40S: llm inference up to ~34b, fine-tuning 7b-13b, image and video generation.
L4 VS L40S - FAQ
Which is cheaper to rent, L4 or L40S?
By today's published on-demand rates: L4 starts at $0.080/GPU/hr (median $0.70, 26 providers) and L40S starts at $0.250/GPU/hr (median $1.39, 48 providers). The cheapest live listing is the L4 at SpotGPUs. Figures recompute from the panel on every refresh.
L4 or L40S - which should I rent?
L4: The L4 is the modern successor to the T4: a 72 W single-slot card with roughly double its predecessor's throughput, FP8 support, and Ada's AV1 video engines. L40S: The L40S is the workhorse of the inference-and-fine-tuning middle: Ada tensor cores with FP8, 48 GB of memory, and a price well below the H100 line. The side-by-side spec table and live price rows above give the full picture.
Where can I rent L4 and L40S?
26 providers publish L4 rates and 48 publish L40S rates on Compute Cafe. Every row links to the provider's own published price - committed-use and reserved rates are excluded.
Full pricing: L4 · L40S · all comparisons