Best Buy has listed the Founders Edition version of the brand new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti at its $1,200 MSRP. And if you're in the market for one of the green team's ultra-enthusiast cards this is surely the one you want—it will be cheaper than pretty much any third-party card, and far cheaper than any you'll find from smaller retailers cashing in on the GPU mining nightmare.
And we don't even want to go near what you'll find them retailing for on Ebay.
The $1,200 price tag for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti might seem super high at first glance... who am I kidding? It really is super high. When the GeForce RTX 3080 can seriously deliver in the frame rate race for considerably less cash, the extreme sticker price of the RTX 3080 Ti feels painfully high, even if it can practically match the novelty sized GeForce RTX 3090 in games.
So yeah, it's a hugely powerful gaming graphics card, and eats 4K gaming for breakfast, and in a normal GPU world we'd be gleefully talking about it as the Titan-esque card it really is.
But when it gets a full retail release tomorrow, June 3, you'll still want to be in the queue for an MSRP Founders Edition version if you're after any sort of new graphics card at all. Sure, there are some third-party GPUs that will launch at MSRP, from the likes of Zotac and Asus, and they may come with slightly superior cooling, but will still probably have the same chip-chillers as their RTX 3080 forebears too.
And we think the shinier FE shroud looks nicer, don't we, Jacob?
Okay, but what makes it a 'bargain'?
Despite the recent dip in fortunes of the demon cryptocurrencies the GPU market is still a nightmarishly barren wasteland, populated only with mercenary groups scrabbling to make a buck from desperate PC gamers and voracious crypto mining freaks.
Scarcity and unprecedented demand has meant prices out on the wild west frontier of retail have skyrocketed, and that's what makes the MSRP pricing for the RTX 3080 Ti a frankly depressing deal.
Over at Amazon, that $1,200 will only net you an AMD RX 6700 XT. It's a decent card in its own right, but a GPU that's not a patch on this ultra-enthusiast GeForce silicon. There are even GeForce RTX 3060 cards going for nigh-on $1,200. And the AMD RX 6800 XT? Well, that's practically shipping for the $2K you'll find some overclocked RTX 3080 Ti cards going for.
Hell, even the RX 580 is retailing for more than $700 today. It was ever one of the darlings of the crypto brigade after all.
The real-world comparative pricing is a marker for just how broken the graphics card market is today, and a miserable sign of the times.
