Buying any of the best graphics cards right now feels like an exercise in futility. For that matter, buying virtually any graphics card at present tends to be a bad idea. We've scoured a variety of online markets to see what sort of prices we could find, and MSRPs are effectively non-existent — laughably so. Everything worth buying sells almost immediately, likely more often than not to scalper bots. What you can find "in stock" tends to be from recently established third-party marketplace sellers, with prices that can at times reach to double the official MSRPs.
Does that make the MSRPs meaningless? At present, it's hard to think otherwise. Even Nvidia itself was only selling limited numbers of RTX 5090 Founders Edition and RTX 5080 Founders Edition cards at GTC 2025 — from a mobile 'food truck.' And you had to be a conference attendee ($1,145 minimum) plus get in line early enough to even grab one.
A better question: When if ever will we see the latest generation GPUs selling at MSRPs? In light of recent tariffs, plus the ongoing graphics card shortages, it could be a very long waiting game. Even looking to places like eBay, the number of latest generation GPUs trading hands doesn't look promising.
At the height of the cryptocurrency GPU mining crazy in mid-2021, we often saw well over 10,000 GPUs 'sold' via eBay every month. Right now, the last 30 days show less than 9,000 GPUs sold on eBay — and that's looking at the past three generations of AMD and Nvidia graphics cards.
