Pre-purchased GeForce RTX 5090 ends up overpriced on eBay
All local Nvidia Founders Editions of the GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 were sold before the launch. Now they are on Ebay.
(Image: Nvidia)
If you want to buy a GeForce RTX 5090 or GeForce RTX 5080, you either have to be patient or bring a lot of money with you. Only a few graphics cards were available at the start of sales. Currently, not a single reputable retailer has any goods in stock.
There are listings on platforms such as eBay, but with prices above 4000 euros for a GeForce RTX 5090, they are a rip-off. Nvidia's own Founders Editions are most frequently offered there.
Sold even before the launch
With the 5000 generation, Nvidia switched to Proshop for the sale of Founders Editions in Europe. However, the retailer had a mishap: the product pages were already available on January 30 before Nvidia's 3 p.m. launch. PCGH shows invoice screenshots of orders placed before 2:30 pm.
The product pages were apparently found by someone simply trying out IDs in the URLs. Proshop numbers its products chronologically. For example, https://www.proshop.de/3331130 takes you to a Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5090 Aorus Master and https://www.proshop.de/3331131 takes you to the white Ice version of the otherwise identical graphics card. This makes it easy to find new products that are not yet officially listed.
In the case of the Founders Editions, someone shared the links via a Discord server, where a purchase bot was also offered to find stock. There were hardly any protective mechanisms against so-called scalpers who buy goods to resell them later at an overpriced price. Worse still, some manufacturers took advantage of the poor availability themselves. Asus, for example, offered its ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 in its own webstore for 4900 euros.
In a statement, Proshop refers to Nvidia. Nvidia has so far remained silent on the matter.
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Long waiting times
The British store Overclockers.co.uk states longer waiting times until the graphics cards are available again: three to 16 weeks for the GeForce RTX 5090 and two to six weeks for the GeForce RTX 5080. In the worst-case scenario, the top model will not be available for purchase until the summer.
Roman "der8auer" Hartung, who is well-connected among hardware manufacturers, provides an insight into the tight production deadlines on YouTube. According to him, partner manufacturers such as Asus, Gainward, Gigabyte, Inno3D, KFA2, MSI, Palit, PNY and Zotac only received final drivers in January. The manufacturers that der8auer spoke to therefore only had two days to just under two weeks to validate their designs.
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