It's pretty wild to think that gamers (and probably scalpers) are
camping out for a graphics card launch days before it releases to retail, yet it's happening. If you don't feel like pitching a tent in front of Micro Center as some have done, however, you can scramble to buy a GeForce RTX 50 series GPU online, with Best Buy already listing several models. Be warned, however, they're likely to sell out fast. More on that in a moment.
Here is every listing that appears at the time of this writing...
By our count, there are 10 cards currently listed. Outside of the Founders Edition variants, all of the other listings are by Gigabyte and/or its Aorus division. Fortunately, early pricing on custom models doesn't appear too insanely wild, at least for air-cooled solutions—the Windforce OC SFF model is priced the same as NVIDIA's FE model, and the Gaming OC card carries a $100 premium.
Premiums go up from there, and once you step in the realm of water cooling, the gap in pricing between custom models and NVIDIA's own FE cards begins to widen further. So far, this culminates in a $400 price difference (between the $1,399.99 Xtreme Waterforce and $999 FE).
Of course, Gigabyte is not the only hardware partner with cards ready to go. We can expect to see custom models from the likes of ASUS, MSI, PNY, Zotac, and others land at retail in the coming days too (not necessarily all at Best Buy). That's the good news. And the bad news?
If you're hoping to score a GeForce RTX 5090 or 5080 when both cards become available on January 30, you may end up disappointed. As
spotted by Videocards, NVIDIA
issued a statement on its community forums warning of a shortage.
"We expect significant demand for the GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 and believe stock-outs may happen. NVIDIA & our partners are shipping more stock to retail every day to help get GPUs into the hands of gamers," NVIDIA stated.
The statement is in line with earlier rumors and speculation of a shortage, hence you can already find GeForce RTX 5090 listings on eBay for hugely inflated prices—
as much as $7,000 earlier this week, and now the highest-priced listing sits at $8,600.
Meanwhile, there's no mention of a shortage (yet?) for the GeForce RTX 5070 or 5070 Ti, which are expected to release in February.