Nvidia RTX 50 Pricing Is Already Going Bonkers
Nvidia's suggested prices for its new RTX 50-series graphics cards have drawn a lot of discussion and derision since being announced at CES, but on day one of the new RTX 5090 and 5080 going on sale, pricing is already ridiculous. The combination of third-party price hikes on their own models, low stock levels, and scalpers getting in on the action, has pushed the cards to truly ludicrous heights.
Nvidia debuted its new RTX 50 series graphics cards at CES in early January, showcasing the next-gen king, the RTX 5090, with a monstrous array of CUDA cores, high-speed GDDR7 memory, and a new generation of RT and Tensor cores. All told, it was supposed to unlock a new level of high-performance 4K gaming, even with ray tracing enabled. It wasn't quite as good as that in reality, and the RTX 5080 was even more disappointing . However, both cards are still faster than their predecessors, with new features, at a lower suggested price than you can find their predecessors at, even on the second-hand market.
Credit: Newegg
But good luck finding any of the new cards at anything close to the suggested pricing—or at all. At the time of writing, the RTX 5090 and 5080 are available for sale across most major retailers, but if you can find one in stock, you've found your unicorn. The prices for the RTX 5080, which were supposed to sit around $1,000, range from a few listings at that price point to over $1,500 in some cases. The RTX 5090, with its suggested price of $2,000, can go for over $3,000.
And that's just for the listings that are out of stock at the time of writing. Braving eBay, we discovered prices that made even these seem pedestrian. One listing, with close to 20 bids at the time of writing, is up to over $5,000 for an RTX 5090 pre-order , with promises to send it on when it arrives. There's an RTX 5080 auction that's close to $2,000 with over 20 bids, and over two days to go.
It's fair to say that some or even most of these bids might be jokes, designed to drive up the price just for the fun of it. But these are far from the only listings if you look around. People are willing to spend a lot to get the latest high-performance graphics cards. Some are even willing to go further than that, with a near-riot in Japan surrounding a raffle to just have the chance to buy one of the new 50-series GPUs.
They might not be that impressive, but they've done enough to get early adopters salivating at the mouth and emptying their wallets.
