Standard Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards have reached unprecedented prices, with models such as the Asus TUF Gaming demanding now demanding $5,169. This is notable, since the TUF Gaming is a standard model with no fancy cooling or extra frills, which makes accessing Nvidia’s flagship GPU at least 2.5x more expensive than the launch MSRP.
Charging $5,090 for an RTX 5090 may sound like a joke, but in today’s market it’s just one step in what feels like never-ending price inflation. What should be a $2,000 graphics card is now costing more than an exclusive fancy version at launch. For example, the MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z with its blinged up liquid cooler and massive built-in screen demanded $5,090 at launch, which is less than the price of a bog-standard Asus TUF Gaming card now. What’s more, the Lightning Z was a special edition card, limited to just 1,300 units, and boasting extensive overclocking capabilities.
Based on PCPartPicker price tracking, the cheapest RTX 5090 now sits at $5,169 in the US. The same goes for the UK and EU, where the cheapest models currently sit at around £3,939 and €4,857, far above their respective launch MSRPs. That UK price is actually more than the cost of buying a complete gaming PC powered by an RTX 5080 and Ryzen 9 9950X3D, with 64GB of RAM.
And that’s taking current hardware prices into account, which makes these latest RTX 5090 prices even more outrageous. As if this wasn’t enough, the number of in-stock models is very limited, with just five variants available below $5,300. In other words, you pay 2.5x more, and you don’t even get a lot of choice.
In fact, prices are so inflated that the difference between the basic and fancy models is negligible, making the latter more appealing by comparison. For example, the liquid-cooled Zotac RTX 5090 ArcticStorm costs just £130 more than the cheapest air-cooled model, which represents a mere 3% difference.
While these listings don’t show how many users are buying RTX 5090 cards at these inflated prices, considering the card’s large 32GB memory pool, which can be useful for AI tasks, I wouldn’t be surprised if stocks dry out faster than they get replenished. AI is not only gobbling all the memory production, causing all related hardware prices to skyrocket, but it’s also steering gaming hardware away from gamers.
