Retailer Stuns Gamer With A $1000 Price Hike On His GeForce RTX 5090 Preorder
Graphics cards are the most important and exciting part of a gaming PC. They're also the most expensive and getting even pricier, as gamers are quickly finding out. NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5090 is at the forefront of this discovery, as a buyer on Reddit recently experienced.
User big_boss_707 preordered an MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Gaming Trio OC model for $2,489.99 from retailer CDW. While the baseline MSRP for the GeForce RTX 5090 is $1,999, it's commonplace for the third-party models to be sold for more, as is the case with this one from MSI. What is less common is to get a massive price hike after placing a preorder, which in this case is now $3,488.99 according to the email allegedly received by the user. This is certainly a drastic increase—right at around a thousand bucks—and completely changes the picture for most buyers.
The GeForce RTX 5090 had already experienced a rocky launch in terms of availability and pricing, quickly selling out due to low inventory levels. With the recent tariffs, its pricing has ballooned on what seems like a weekly basis for the same models. The RTX 5090 is still difficult to get and sells out at most retailer shops immediately, even with the sky-high prices it has reached. This does not bode well for the typical gamer, or content creator. And it's certainly a gut punch to have a retailer reach out after placing a preorder to say that the already-high price just went up by around a thousands bucks. Oof!
AMD released its RDNA 4 Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, which had initial higher stock in some U.S locations such as Micro Center. GPUs in general are still difficult to find, especially anywhere near the original MSRP pricing for both NVIDIA and AMD.
The RTX 5090 is in high demand from both gamers as well as AI use due to its impressive specifications. Together with tariffs, this paints a bleak picture for both pricing and availability for most. In the past, high-end GPUs such as the GTX 1080 Ti were available for a reasonable $699 MSRP, which extended as far as the $699 RTX 3080. The same 80-class RTX 5080 is now at an MSRP of $999, but with a more realistic street price of over $1300 for most models.
