Marginally less inevitable than the relentless march of cosmic entropy and ensuing heat death of the universe is the near-certainty that scalpers will try to make a quick buck on the latest high-end GPU from Nvidia. Enter the imminent RTX 5090 and eBay listings of up to $7,000.
Of course, in theory, none of the sellers on ebay ought to have an RTX 5090 to actually sell. The new GPU doesn't officially go on sale for another six days on January 30.
However, a quick scan of the eBay listings in the US reveals various claimed methods of sourcing the cards. One seller plans to do the midnight queue at Micro Center to bag as many as possible.
"I’ll [be] standing in line at Micro Center and try to get as many as possible ,so this is a presale. I’ll ship these as soon as possible," the listing says. The current bid on that one stands at $2,750.
Another claims to be posted by an employee at a retailer in possession of "guaranteed" slots to buy 5090s. "I am an employee of a certain technology retailer and have guaranteed slots for a few of these GPU's. I have no interest in upgrading my current build and am looking to sell my guarantee slot for the card," the auction, which currently stands at $4,000, says. Ouch.
As we write these words, the fixed-price listings seem to start at around $3,750. That $7,000 item is for an overclocked Asus board.
If all this is indeed utterly inevitable, it's hard to actually draw too many conclusions about availability and real-world prices for the new RTX 5090, which has an MSRP of $2,000.
There are rumours circulating that indicate supply may be very limited. But it's unclear how accurate they are or how long any shortage might last. We'll probably need a few weeks to a few months to really get a feel for that.
Odds are, the 5090 will sell out almost immediately on day one, even with quite a healthy supply. It'll be the weeks and months that follow which determine what the real-world price for Nvidia's latest uber GPU will be.
Personally, I wouldn't be inclined to pay over list for this one. As I discussed the other day, high-end GPUs can actually be strong value propositions in the long term, provided you can stomach the up front hit.
An RTX 4090 bought on launch day over two years ago is still a great card today and in raw performance terms will likely remain behind only the new 5090—and not by all that much—for another couple of years.
The problem with the 5090 is that it uses carried-over N4 silicon, the same production node as the 4090. That's limited Nvidia's ability to scale the performance, what with the GB202 GPU inside the 5090 basically hitting the physical size limit, known as maximum reticle size, for a GPU die design at manufacturer TSMC.
However, it's very likely that Nvidia will move to a more advanced node for its next GPU, possibly delivering a much bigger jump with the RTX 6090, or whatever Nvidia chooses to call it, and undermining the RTX 5090's long-term appeal.
At $2,000, the 5090 is just about OK as a long-term buy. Anything much above that and the appeal just isn't there. I'd probably be more inclined to go with a $1,000 RTX 5080 and then drop another $1,000 on whatever replaces the 5080 on the assumption that the next gen will probably be a bigger step and I'll end up with something faster than a 5090.
Anyway, take care out there on eBay, peeps, they're out to get your money.
