After years of prices being driven ever higher, first by crypto mining and now by genAI, graphics cards have become farcically expensive in 2026. There’s no better example of this than the current price tag on an RTX 5090, which is now selling for an astonishing $7,500 at Best Buy.
As observed by am.will on X, Best Buy’s prices for both the ROG Astral and TUF Gaming SKUs of the 32GB RTX 5090, Nvidia’s current top-range general-market GPU, are currently $7,494.99.
Looking on Amazon, prices are not much different. Gigabyte’s AORUS 5090 was last sold at $6,899, although it’s now out of stock. According to my price-tracking plugin, that was $4,888 at launch, already more than double the intended MSRP of $1,999, but has been as cheap as $3,885. That means the card on Amazon is now well over triple the launch price, even if almost nobody was ever able to buy one at that rate.
The 5090 has always been notoriously expensive, the current cutting edge for consumer GPUs, but this doubling in price since its January 2025 launch is unlike anything the market has seen before. Heck, it’s plain weird that Nvidia’s most current card is over a year and a half old with no word on when the 6000 range (codenamed Rubin) will reach home desktops. (They’re currently available as workstation cards, and will cost you around $15,000 or more.) By now we would usually expect to have seen the price drop significantly from launch as the GPU becomes more ubiquitous. Instead, supplies barely exist, as the market is obliterated by the demands of AI server warehouses.
The 5080 is, it should be noted, far more widely available, albeit still at prices that’ll hurt anyone looking to build a new PC. Starting at around $1,700, the less powerful sister GPU is at least vaguely feasible, although it’s roughly 50 percent less powerful than the 5090, with half the cores, half the VRAM, and half the memory bandwidth. Still, at least you can run a 5080 without needing to buy a 1200W PSU, although you won’t be running much at 4K at top specs.
Seeing a retailer like Best Buy listing the products at these prices is something else. And if you don’t like it, good luck going anywhere else. As I jump around various U.S. sites and stores trying to find a better price, all I’m seeing is “out of stock.” Even Nvidia’s own site is just a grayed-out graveyard. Best Buy is currently winning by having anything to sell at all.
Correction: 09/16/2026, 3:39 a.m. ET: This article originally stated that the Best Buy prices were first-party, not third-party. This was my mistake, and the article has now been corrected. As it happens, the links now point to a different seller with a lower price but with no stock.
