Nvidia's latest graphics cards have been called many things: "The most powerful graphics core you can jam into a gaming PC", "fine", "strangely unexciting", "a paper launch". And you would get to make that decision for yourself where there cards to actually buy, but Newegg has stated that it sold out of its RTX 50-series allotment "in record time".
That's according to a press release it has just sent me detailing yesterday's launch from its perspective. It's worth noting up front it hasn't said how the initial stock levels compared with its previous Nvidia GPU launches, so there are a lot of unknowns behind the numbers, but it notes that while it took 20 minutes to entirely sell out of RTX 50-series stock, that was with "most inventory claimed in just five minutes."
That certainly jibes with my own experience of the launch, where it seemed like across all the US and UK retailers, the cards were gone in five minutes.
Newegg stocked a wide range of different cards from Nvidia's add-in board partners, but it also stocks a load of different prebuilt gaming PCs which sport the green team's two new GPUs. From its own brand, ABS, to iBuyPower, Skytech, and Yeyian, the PCs were the reason it took as long as 20 minutes to entirely sell through.
It also states that around the launch period Newegg's traffic went up by as much as ten times. So yeah, a lot of people wanted to get themselves an RTX 50-series card. Interestingly, from our own data, it's been the RTX 5080 which has been the most in-demand of the two cards. I mean, that does stand to reason as it has a much more broad appeal given its half the price of the RTX 5090, but it's also a far less exciting GPU all-round.
"The response to the NVIDIA RTX 50 Series has been extraordinary," says Jim Tseng, Newegg VP of product management. "The overwhelming demand reaffirms the gaming and PC community’s enthusiasm for the very best technology. For our customers who have not yet been able to secure a GPU, we’re committed to working with NVIDIA and our AIB (Add-In Board) partners to ensure future restocks and continued availability."
And when will those restocks happen? Well, there was actually a second round of RTX 5080 inventory released at Newegg a couple of hours after the launch announced via X. So it's worth either keeping an eye on the social media pages of your favorite retailers, or else keeping tabs on our own 'Where to buy...' articles.
