Abstract:
According to the latest retail tracking data from Hardwareluxx, a well-known European technology media, and Geizhals, a mainstream German price comparison platform, the spot listing price of NVIDIA's flagship graphics card GeForce RTX 5090 in the German market has exceeded the 5,000 euro mark. Currently, it is impossible to find any spot RTX 5090 with a price lower than 5,200 euros on the market. The mainstream non-public version model is approaching 5,500 euros.
Compared with the starting price of approximately 3,029 euros in January this year, the cumulative increase of this card in just eight months has been as high as approximately 73%.
On the German e-commerce platform, the RTX 5090 currently recording the lowest price is INNO3D iCHILL Frostbite Pro water-cooled version, which has a tax-included price of 5,242.94 euros. The starting price of conventional air-cooled main non-public version cards, including MSI Ventus 3X OC, has also risen to more than 5,249 euros. In comparison, the suggested retail price (MSRP) of Nvidia's official Founders Edition in Germany was previously set at 2,099 euros, which means that the spot price of all non-public editions currently available on the market has soared to more than 2.5 times the official suggested retail price.
This hardware storm with out-of-control prices is not limited to Europe. Prior to this, the price of RTX 5090 in mainstream retail channels in the United States has exceeded the US$5,000 mark, and the graphics card hardware industry is facing a global premium disorder. However, in the face of the situation where the terminal selling price has seriously deviated from the recommended retail track, NVIDIA officials have never publicly made a formal comment on this or taken countermeasures; on the contrary, NVIDIA has recently relied more on the limited release of a small number of public version cards at the original manufacturer's recommended retail price at certain large-scale exhibitions such as PAX West as a public relations promotion, which has not fundamentally solved the purchasing dilemma faced by ordinary consumers.
Industry supply chain surveys show that the root cause of this round of out-of-control surge in graphics card prices is not that NVIDIA officially raised the guide price of core GPUs, but due to the vicious supply shortage and soaring cost of GDDR7 high-speed video memory in the BOM cost of the whole machine. As global artificial intelligence computing crazily absorbs high-bandwidth memory wafer production capacity, the supply and demand of general-purpose and dedicated high-speed graphics memory particles are severely imbalanced. In the past few months, core cost pressure has been directly and seamlessly transmitted to consumer terminals by major graphics card cooperative brands (AIC). As early as the end of last year, there were leaks in the industry predicting that the RTX 5090 would be pushed to the $5,000 mark in 2026. Now this seemingly exaggerated prediction has completely come true in the market.
Hardware analysts pointed out that since the structural shortage of global upstream storage semiconductors does not see any substantial signs of relief in the short term, it is obviously unrealistic to expect ultra-high-end flagship cards such as the RTX 5090 to see a price correction in the near future. This consumer-grade flagship graphics card, originally aimed at geek players and professional content creators, is gradually evolving into a luxury product that is beyond the reach of most ordinary PC consumers, fueled by the AI infrastructure bubble and component supply chain crisis.
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