Hopper
NVIDIA H100 SXM5 80GB
wins
4
The H100 SXM5 is the high-performance form factor of the H100.
Ampere
NVIDIA RTX 3090
wins
1
The RTX 3090 remains a popular budget option for AI workloads with 24GB GDDR6X.
Performance comparison
Visual bars — winner highlighted
NVIDIA H100 SXM5 80GB
Metric
NVIDIA RTX 3090
FP16 TFLOPS
Bandwidth
VRAM
TDP (lower=better)
TFLOPS/watt
GB/s per watt
Full specification table
| Spec | NVIDIA H100 SXM5 80GB | NVIDIA RTX 3090 |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Hopper | Ampere |
| VRAM | 80 GB HBM3 | 24 GB GDDR6X |
| VRAM type | HBM3 | GDDR6X |
| Memory bandwidth | 3,350 GB/s | 936 GB/s |
| FP16 TFLOPS | 989 TFLOPS | 71 TFLOPS |
| TDP | 700 W | 350 W |
| TFLOPS/watt | 1.41 T/W | 0.20 T/W |
| GB/s per watt | 4.79 GB/s/W | 2.67 GB/s/W |
| NVLink | Yes | No |
| Release year | 2022 | 2020 |
Live cloud pricing
On-demand pricing across providers — updated in real time
Power efficiency analysis
TFLOPS/watt and GB/s/watt — critical for data center TCO
NVIDIA H100 SXM5 80GB
NVIDIA RTX 3090
TFLOPS/watt measures compute efficiency — how much AI throughput you get per watt of power consumed. For data centers with PUE of 1.2–1.5, a 10% improvement in TFLOPS/watt translates directly to lower electricity costs and cooling requirements. GB/s/watt measures memory bandwidth efficiency, which is the binding constraint for memory-bound LLM inference workloads.
When to choose each GPU
Choose NVIDIA H100 SXM5 80GB for:
- LLM training
- Multi-GPU NVLink clusters
- High-throughput inference
Weaknesses / Limitations
- Highest cost per H100 variant — premium over PCIe form factor
- SXM5 form factor requires NVLink-capable server chassis
- 700W TDP demands high-density power and cooling infrastructure
Choose NVIDIA RTX 3090 for:
- Budget fine-tuning
- Small model inference
- Hobbyist AI
Weaknesses / Limitations
- Older Ampere architecture — significantly lower TFLOPS than Ada equivalents
- 350W TDP — high power draw for a 24 GB consumer card
- No ECC memory — not suitable for production reliability requirements
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