Rent an RTX2080 PC for $24.99 per month? That’s now a reality

Cloud gaming has been commonplace for more than a decade now, but Windows licensing meant that until recently it was impossible to run a Windows 10 operating system on a dedicated computer with its own graphics card and peripherals.

Shadow cloud gaming - $24.99/mo (with RTX2080 GPU)

Shadow cloud gaming - <a href="https://www.awin1.com/awclick.php?awinmid=16031&awinaffid=103504&clickref=hawk-custom-tracking&p=https%3A%2F%2Fshop.shadow.tech%2Fusen%2Fpre-order" data-link-merchant="shadow.tech"" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">$24.99/mo (with RTX2080 GPU)
If your device is nowhere near powerful enough to run your favorite games, French company Shadow might just have the solution for you. For $24.99 per month, you can game over the cloud via a computer kitted out with Nvidia's GeForce RTX2080 GPU, giving you all the graphical firepower you could ever need.

Enter Shadow, a French company that promises to truly bring PC gaming to the cloud and has raised more than $100 million in funding to date.

The service is slowly rolling out in the US and a slew of computers are expected to be brought online this summer. They won't necessarily be available country-wide, so you'll need to check whether Shadow PCs are online in your state.

All Shadow's PCs come with an Intel Core CPU and a dedicated Nvidia graphics card so, while gaming is the company's core focus, its computers can be used for anything that requires oomph: video editing, CAD, 3D modelling, audio editing, programming and more.

The cheapest subscription costs $11.99/month when you sign up for a year-long contract. That will set you up with an Intel quad-core CPU clocked at up to 3.4GHz, 12GB RAM, a 256GB SSD, Windows 10 Home and an Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU (or equivalent). Given a refurbished GTX1080 alone costs about $500, this appears to be an excellent deal.

Found a better deal?

Have you managed to get hold of a cheaper product with equivalent specifications? Let us know and we'll tip our hat to you. 

There’s also a more powerful PC available with the RTX2080 (which costs about $650 on its own) for $24.99/month and a $39.99/month package that comes with the $2,500 Titan RTX GPU.

Just bear in mind, you'll need your own device (whether that's a computer, smartphone or tablet) to take advantage of the service.

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.