Graphics cards are getting crazy expensive, yet again. Between high demand, low supply, and broader trade wars, the launch of Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs is bringing back traumatic memories of the pandemic. (Specifically about graphics cards, I suppose there’s plenty of trauma to go around there.) The GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 disappeared from store shelves instantly, and now, the first retail listings for the incoming RTX 5070 Ti are showing massively inflated prices.
Prices are getting crazy
As Tom’s Hardware reports, there are now over a dozen online listings for Nvidia’s new high-mid GPU scattered across western Europe, and the prices are alarming. Nvidia announced a $750 USD recommended price for the card, but the most expensive one spotted so far is the Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5070 Ti Master at €1,399, sold by Caseking in Germany. With currency conversion, that’s nearly double the base price.
CaseKing
There are other similarly inflated offerings from Asus, Inno3D, and PNY, rating from a 28 percent to 92 percent markup, all in Europe. But it’s worth noting that the singular US listing highlighted in the article, the PNY RTX 5070 Ti OC at MicroCenter, is exactly $750. In a similar article, VideoCardz.com spotted a single listing for the Inno3D RTX 5070 Ti X3 in Finland at €924. That’s about $970 USD, but considering Nvidia’s increased European prices for its own Founder’s Edition cards, it’s not unreasonable. The $1000 RTX 5080 and $2000 RTX 5090 are listed at €1169 and €2329, respectively, on the German site.
MicroCenter now has other RTX 5070 Ti cards listed as well, topping out at $1009.99, a 35 percent markup. In Euro prices that would be €963.
Don’t panic
So we’re looking at a few different factors here. First and perhaps most importantly, there is no Nvidia Founder’s Edition for the RTX 5070 Ti like there is for the 5080 and 5090, no baseline by which the various customized OEM cards are to be judged. That includes judgment by price. Nvidia’s partners often spruce up the reference design with extra features to try and justify a higher price, and to distinguish their cards from the competition. A beefed-up cooler here, a small overclock there. But with only a few exceptions, like deluxe versions that add water cooling, most of these cards offer nearly identical performance.
In previous generations, we know that even without a Founder’s Edition, Nvidia required its board partners to release at least some cards at the manufacturer’s retail price. They’ve done so with a small selection of cards that have been minimally customized. We assume (hope?) that this will still be the case for the RTX 5070 Ti. The fact that two retail listings have been spotted at or near MSRP seems to bear this out.
So you’re going to see higher prices on the OC Triple X Super Duper Alpha Gamer CHAD Edition cards, and there are going to be more of those cards in stock versus the plain Jane models. Bummer, but that’s just the way board partner relationships work.
Asus
The second factor to consider is that directly comparing European prices to US prices is a bit of an apples to oranges situation. Prices for most goods, especially high-end, finished electronics, are usually higher in Europe. Most European countries place a Value Added Tax (VAT) on imported goods, and that VAT is factored into the final prices you see in stores. Other factors raise relative prices in Europe, like easy large-scale shipping between the US west coast and Asia.
US stores charge sales tax, but this varies depending on which state you’re in — there’s no universal federal sales tax. For this reason, US advertised prices don’t include the sales tax, which can vary from nothing at all to 7.25 percent. Sales tax is typically added at checkout, along with shipping. But to put it simply, the region is pretty much always going see higher prices for electronics.
So it looks like it’s going to be possible to find RTX 5070 Ti cards at retail price when the new GPU launches on February 20th. But those cards are going to be in extremely short supply — even more so than usual at a new card launch. More expensive “custom” graphics cards should be available in larger numbers…though it seems likely that they’ll all sell out on day one, too.
Nvidia’s official base price for the RTX 5070 Ti in Germany is €879, equivalent to $922 USD. Considering Finland’s slightly higher VAT versus Germany, the single €924 MSRP listing found by VideoCardz.com is right on the money. Again, we’re guessing that Nvidia is requiring its OEM partners to offer at least some cards at the base price.
…okay, maybe panic a little
Now for the bad news. Even accounting for all of those factors, the largest markup seen so far in Europe is still nearly 60 percent over MSRP. The Gigabyte Aorus Master series is the company’s highest offering. But whatever special sauce you want to throw on it, it’s a pretty mild overclock of the reference design, without any liquid cooling or gilded lilies. It is a massive amount of extra money you’re paying for, at best, a single-digit boost in performance.
Again, there are multiple factors in play here. You’ve got pent-up demand from gamers who’ve waited two years for a new generation of Nvidia cards. You’ve got new tech in the hardware making manufacturing yields fairly low, at least at the start. You’ve got the AI boom, mirroring the cryptocurrency boom and making regular consumers compete with everyone from giant industrial players to garage startups. And you’ve got trade wars from the US causing chaos in global pricing and supply chains. Throw in the usual scalpers and resellers trying to make an easy buck on in-demand products, and it’s a perfect storm of pernicious pricing.
Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry
All that considered, manufacturers and retailers can be reasonably confident that they’ll sell every single card in their inventories immediately. As long as the prices aren’t so insane that someone can’t afford to pay them, they’ll sell out. So they have no reason to be, well, reasonable, especially if they can pretend that a 5 percent overclock and a few RGB lights are somehow worth $300 over the base price.
Unless you’re willing to camp out in front of your favorite electronics retailer (and maybe not even then), you won’t be finding a card at MSRP on launch day. You might not even find one within, say, 20 percent of that price anytime soon. We can hope that AMD offers some solid competition on pricing, especially at the xx70/xx70+ tier. But I wouldn’t hold my breath on that — if Nvidia is selling every card it can make, there’s no reason for Radeon cards to significantly undercut them, either.
It’s a bad time to try and upgrade a GPU, at least if you want the latest and most powerful tech.