After weeks of rumors around another round of hikes, Asus and Gigabyte have pulled the plug. They’ve made the impending price hike official, increasing prices across their entire RTX 50 lineup, and even AMD’s Radeon RX 9000 cards.
It’s worth mentioning that both companies already raised prices in January, blaming the ongoing DRAM and NAND memory shortage and surging costs. From what it looks like, things have only gotten worse since.
NVIDIA
How bad is the price hike?
According to a VideoCardz report, the latest price hike affects the best Nvidia GPUs in the worst possible manner. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090D V2 has received a channel price increase of $592 and $666 from Gigabyte and Asus, respectively.
Similarly, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti have received price revisions of $207 to $222 and $222 to $252 by Gigabyte and Asus, respectively. Moving down the ladder, the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti has received a channel price revision of $96 to $104 and $74 to $96 by the companies.
Do you see the pattern? Setting the price hikes aside for the moment, Gigabyte appears to be cutting its customers some slack here, while Asus seems to be passing on the increase in component costs more aggressively.
Mariia Shalabaieva / Unsplash
Just how widespread is this?
Entry-level cards like the GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3060 have also seen a revision of $44 and $141, respectively. In fact, the prices of the AMD cards with Asus, including the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9060 XT, have also been revised by $170 and $74-$96, respectively.
One buyer’s story shows just how ugly the GPU market’s situation is right now. A Reddit user’s $4,429 Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 order, placed through Nvidia’s own marketplace, got canceled outright, simply because Asus told Nvidia it couldn’t supply the hardware at that price anymore.
And guess what the same card is now listed for — $4,982, which is nearly 2.5 times Nvidia’s original Founders Edition price.
If this feels familiar, it should. Prices on this generation of GPUs have been steadily creeping toward doubling their launch cost. The latest round of hikes just confirms that trend has nowhere to go but up for now. If you’ve been waiting to build your PC, the situation doesn’t look good at all, and the best time to get a new GPU was yesterday.