By John Walker
Publication Date: 2026-09-15 14:00:00
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. This isn’t a third-party seller trying its luck, but the retail chain’s base price for the in-stock peripheral.
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…
