Why have high-end GPU prices become so extreme?
Asked by
MellowPanda47
I only noticed how bad the market had gotten after seeing a local listing from someone offering around $3,000 for RTX 5090 cards. When did high-end graphics cards become this expensive? I bought a ROG RTX 4090 about two years ago for nearly $2,000, but now I'm seeing some listings at roughly twice that price. The most demanding game I play is Resident Evil 4 Remake, so I'm wondering whether it makes sense to sell my 4090 while prices are high, switch to an AMD card, and keep the difference.
Answers
There are still some reasonable deals if you look at complete systems instead of individual flagship cards. For example, a prebuilt with a 5070, 32GB of DDR5, and a 2TB SSD can cost around $1,400, while standalone 5090 pricing is completely detached from normal gaming value. Since Resident Evil 4 Remake isn’t especially demanding compared with newer titles, selling the 4090 and moving to a cheaper AMD card could make financial sense if you don’t need its ray tracing or upscaling features.
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The 5090 market is particularly unreasonable right now. Used cards can sell almost immediately for several thousand dollars, while some 4090s are listed around twice what they originally cost. Cards with large amounts of VRAM are attracting the most speculation because they’re useful for AI workloads.
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The biggest factor is the AI and data-center boom. High-end Nvidia cards have lots of VRAM and compute performance, so they’re being bought for AI workloads as well as gaming. That has pushed the prices of cards with more than 16GB of memory especially far above normal levels.
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The market has been through several shocks. The 2020–2022 supply shortages and logistics problems drove prices up, and the later AI boom created another wave of demand. Expensive memory and storage have also added to the general cost of building a PC, so this isn’t limited to graphics cards.
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MellowPanda47: I knew RAM prices had gotten rough, but I didn’t realize people were also buying up gaming GPUs for AI when dedicated accelerator cards exist.