Finding an RTX 5090 in Store Is Becoming Easier, Only Because Prices Have Now Been Jacked Up
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I recently strolled through my local Micro Center, a brick-and-mortar store that has become a haven for PC builders. Surprisingly, typically out-of-stock GPUs remained in stock after the morning lines had diminished.
The last months have been pretty hectic with the recent GPU launches, but it seems things have finally begun slowing down. Little did I know that the reasoning isn’t because stock is becoming healthy, specifically for the RTX 5000 lines of GPUs. No, it’s because the cards have seen a near 50% markup before scalper pricing, with even the elusive RTX 5090 now becoming common to see sitting on store shelves.
Despite the Price Gouging, These GPUs Are Still Selling, Just at a Slower Rate
If you’ve been in a Micro Center recently or browsed the Nvidia subreddit, chances are you’ve seen the post showing a bunch of RTX 5090 cards still sitting on the shelves at a Dallas-based Micro Center. This is somewhat surprising considering that Dallas is ranked as the 9th biggest city in the USA, and the traffic that goes through there daily would have had you thinking that these cards would have been swooped up immediately. Mind you, upon checking for inventory via the Dallas website for Micro Center, these cards have been completely sold out now as of March 28th, though such a site of what appears to be a decent amount of cards is a rare one to see.
Microcenter Dallas got tons of 5090 Astral Liquid’s in today
byu/pagusas innvidia
Funny enough, the local Micro Center here in Minnesota, one that has seen a line during nearly every opening day since the RTX 5090 launched, still had some RTX 5090, and even RTX 5080 when I was in there early morning yesterday. They were the same models in the picture above, the ASUS NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Astral LC Overclocked Liquid Cooled 32GB GDDR7. A comparable amount of them were sitting on the shelves, with the count dropping to four right around 2:00 PM central, and upon closing, per the local inventory check on the website, the store only managed to sell one more of these cards. They did end up selling out the following day, but it’s telling how much the demand has slowed down for the GPUs.
There’s a good reason, though, not because everyone who wanted one got one or that Nvidia and partners have managed to keep up with supplies. Nope, it’s been quite the opposite, as the supply chain is still pretty bad outside of the RTX 5070 line, that’s been a tough sell compared to AMD’s recently released RX 9700 cards. It’s because the prices of the RTX 5090, and even RTX 5080, have gotten outrageously high. That same ASUS NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Astral LC Overclocked Liquid Cooled 32GB GDDR7 costs a whopping $3,719.99 before taxes. For comparison, the original MSRP for this variant was $3,099.99. A near $700 markup is happening at a retailer before scalpers get their hands on it to jack it up even further.
Other cards on the shelves from previous days were also well over $3K, though the markup from their MSRP wasn’t as severe as the Astral LC.
Variants of the RTX 5080 cards are also common on store shelves. Our local Micro Center had plenty of them in stock yesterday, but that number has dropped to only a few as of today.
You can see they, too, are also suffering from marked-up pricing.
Ultimately, this tells us that while some will still pay the outrageous pricing, many are now sitting it out with the hopes of things returning to MSRP. That, or they’re moving on to AMD, who, while it hasn’t been immune to the price increases (the RX 9700 series is also above MSRP now), is still offering a cheaper card that boasts some pretty solid performance for the price.
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