Ultra-Rare EVGA GeForce RTX 4090 Charity Auction Is Live And On Track To Blow Past $10K
EVGA is auctioning off its own-brand GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card that never released to the public, with all proceeds going to benefit St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. While not quite a one-of-a-kind GPU, it's an extremely rare graphics card, in that EVGA severed ties with NVIDIA at the 11th hour leading up to the GeForce RTX 40 series launch, and exited the GPU market entirely.
It's not clear how many of these cards EVGA built before it pulled out of the GPU market. Pre-release cards found their way into the hands of some popular YouTube personalities, including JayzTwoCents and Steve Burke from Gamers Nexus, but none were ever released to retail. As such, EVGA explicitly states that the card is sold as-is with no warranty or returns. However, it also notes that the model up for auction "is a working card."
Interestingly, EVGA initially posted the card for auction on eBay, but says it was removed "due to the new account status and larger dollar amount." So it pivoted to using its own forum for the auction. Anyone who wants to bid has to open a forum account, and then reply to the thread with a dollar amount.
EVGA is only accepting bid increases in $100 increments. And to avoid sniping, any bids placed within the final hour of the auction closing without any prior bid(s) will be removed. The auction began yesterday and runs until December 16th at 11:59am PT (2:59pm ET).
In the short time the auction has been up, bidding has already reached $8,200. At this pace, the card could easily exceed $10,000 by the time it ends on Friday, and perhaps by a significant amount. Of course, that assumes the bids are legitimate.
Many of the recent bids come from new members to EVGA's forums. The MSRP for a GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition model is $1,599. Meanwhile, GeForce RTX 4090 cards of all kinds (FE and custom models) are fetching between around $2,000 and $2,700 on eBay, if sorting through recently-ended auctions that actually sold.
EVGA's in-house auction has already attracted bids far above what GeForce RTX 4090 cards are commanding on eBay. Obviously none of the ones on eBay are as rare as EVGA's prototype model, and there's a charity angle to EVGA's auction. Even so, it's hard to fathom someone paying $10,000 or more (depending on the final bid amount). But hey, we'll see.
In the event that the winning bid is not legitimate, EVGA will go down the list to the next highest bidder(s) until someone pays up. So stay tuned to see what EVGA's auction actually rakes in.
