Graphics card manufacturers have recently hiked up their pricing for NVIDIA’s latest RTX 50 series cards to unprecedented levels for consumer cards. While sticker shock for a premium GPU is nothing really new to the PC enthusiast sector, case in point: NVIDIA RTX TITAN at $2,499 in 2018 (per TPU), is usually on the rarer side of the market as opposed to across the board pricing including models of a lower product stack. This time around, though, it seems as Dr. Peter Venkman once said, “No job is too big, No fee is too big.”
VideoCardz has reported that both MSI and ASUS have raised prices for various RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 models with the latter’s premium liquid-cooled card, the RTX 5090 ROG ASTRAL LC OC Edition having gone from an already hard-to-believe price of $3,099 to $3,409.99. Not to be left out, MSI has raised the cost of its RTX 5090 SUPRIM LIQUID SOC from $2,499 to $2,789. It’s also been reported that MSI is no longer offering any RTX 50 series card at NVIDIA’s MSRP while ASUS still lists one model, the ASUS PRIME GeForce RTX 5080 at its MSRP of $999. However, that product listing also denotes a $265 savings which could mean that it will go up at some point. On a side note, ASUS has begun listing RTX 5070 Ti models but currently without pricing.
Latest RTX 50 series pricing from ASUS and MSI:
Those looking at other brands for MSRP may not have much luck there, either, GIGABYTE only has one model still listed with its Windforce Overclocked Triple Fan RTX 5080/5090 cards. A quick look at Microcenter’s listings (1, 2) shows graphics card manufacturers PNY and Zotac have slightly tamer pricing, but neither is offering any models at MSRP. Graphics card manufacturers have previously stated that NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5080 MSRP is akin to “charity” rather than profit, but as is already being mentioned, raising prices a week after launch or announcements is not exactly an ethical strategy or a friendly consumer approach, but then again the word “con” is a part of consumer so perhaps therein lies the truth.