Guides # Guides. Longer pieces on the questions that decide which machine you should rent — written against the hardware we actually operate, with the arithmetic shown. - Written against the hardware we operate - Commands you can paste, not pseudocode - Arithmetic shown, so you can check it ## All 10 guides 5 on sizing · 2 on cost · 2 on practice · 1 on payment - [Sizing · 9 min How much VRAM a model actually needs The arithmetic behind “will it fit”: weights, KV cache, and the two places a rule of thumb goes wrong by a factor of three. Read the guide](https://gpuserver.io/guides/vram-sizing) - [Sizing · 7 min NVLink or PCIe: which one your job needs When the link between cards decides your throughput, when it changes nothing, and how to tell which case you are in before you pay for the wrong node. Read the guide](https://gpuserver.io/guides/nvlink-vs-pcie) - [Sizing · 9 min Choosing a card for image and video models What FLUX, SDXL, SD 3.5 and Wan 2.1 need in VRAM, which card in our catalogue holds each, and why the cheapest one that fits is rarely the one to rent. Read the guide](https://gpuserver.io/guides/gpu-for-flux-sdxl) - [Sizing · 10 min Choosing a quantisation format What AWQ, GPTQ, GGUF and FP8 each cost in memory, speed and quality — and why the format with the smallest weights rarely gives the smallest model. Read the guide](https://gpuserver.io/guides/awq-vs-gptq-vs-fp8) - [Sizing · 10 min Running a mixture-of-experts model Total parameters decide the machine, active parameters decide the speed. What DeepSeek V3 and Qwen 3 235B need in VRAM, and which node to rent for them. Read the guide](https://gpuserver.io/guides/mixture-of-experts) - [Cost · 6 min When monthly rental beats per-hour The break-even worked out on real numbers, the three costs an hourly price hides until the invoice, and the idle-time trap that triples an estimate. Read the guide](https://gpuserver.io/guides/monthly-vs-hourly) - [Cost · 9 min Self-hosting against a per-token API The break-even between paying an API per token and renting a GPU, worked out on our own prices and throughput — and the four things the arithmetic leaves out. Read the guide](https://gpuserver.io/guides/api-vs-self-hosting) - [Practice · 11 min Serving Llama 3.3 70B on one node From a delivered machine to an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, with the flags that matter and the two that silently halve your throughput. Read the guide](https://gpuserver.io/guides/serve-llama-70b) - [Practice · 10 min Fine-tuning a 70B model on one card QLoRA on a single 48 GB GPU: what fits, what it costs for a month, and why full fine-tuning is a different order of machine. Read the guide](https://gpuserver.io/guides/lora-finetune) - [Payment · 8 min Paying for a server in crypto What actually happens between clicking pay and getting root, which coin to choose, and the four mistakes that lose money on a first payment. Read the guide](https://gpuserver.io/guides/pay-in-crypto) Why these, and not more ## Ten questions decide which machine you should rent. We would rather write ten pieces that answer a real question than sixty that rank for a search term. Each guide above exists because it is a question we are asked before an order, and each one is written against the cards in [our own catalogue](https://gpuserver.io/#catalog) — the numbers in them are numbers from machines we operate. Where a guide shows a formula, it is the same formula the [configurator](https://gpuserver.io/configure) uses to tell you whether a model fits. That is deliberate: you should be able to check our arithmetic rather than take the green tick on trust. Straight to the point If you already know what you need **See every configuration**41 nodes, filterable [Catalogue](https://gpuserver.io/#catalog) **Check a model fits**Before paying anything [Configurator](https://gpuserver.io/configure) **Commands and first hour**From delivery to first token [Documentation](https://gpuserver.io/docs) **Ask a person**Answered by someone who racks them [Configure](https://gpuserver.io/configure) ## Every guide ends at the same place. A machine you can rent by the month, pay for in crypto, and open without proving who you are. [Browse the catalogue](https://gpuserver.io/#catalog) [Read the guides](https://gpuserver.io/guides) --- Source: https://gpuserver.io/guides/. This file is generated from the same data as the website; if a figure here differs from a page, the page is authoritative and this file is stale — the canonical source is https://gpuserver.io/.