Take it from me, a gamer rocking the last-gen Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super and still loving life: your rig doesn’t need the most bleeding edge graphics card. That’s especially true when the 50-series cards can easily set you back many more smackers than Nvidia’s MSRP. The RTX 5090 is especially bad for this right now, with the cheapest deal I can find anywhere online still being $4,500/£3,499.
The company appears all too aware of the runaway pricing of these GPUs. Case in point, Nvidia set up ‘Verified Priority Access IRL’ at its QuakeCon booth this year, offering attendees the chance to buy either the GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080, or RTX 5070 Founders Edition for MSRP “while supplies last”.
Sadly, to get a decent deal on an RTX 5090 these days, flying out to Quakecon may actually not be the most outrageous idea. As I’m based in the UK, the cheapest round trip flight to Dallas, Texas I can find would cost me about $1,428. Add to that the RTX 5090’s $1,999 MSRP, and the $16.50 price of admission to Quakecon, plus some no doubt hellish jet lag, and I will have only had to spend a little over $3,443 (or roughly £2,556) total on Nvidia’s most powerful graphics card. That’s ridiculous.
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But let’s say I actually carried out this still very expensive, hare-brained scheme. After a nearly 19-hour flight—with a self-transfer—I could rock up to Nvidia’s booth only to find it sold out of RTX 5090s. The booth only has a limited amount of GPUs available for sale each day, after all.
That said, the booth is also offering a limited supply of “cool freebies,” such as a pack of GeForce Trading Cards “showcasing 14 of GeForce’s greatest gaming moments.” If I went to the Nvidia booth after a 19-hour flight, only to find these trading cards were left, I dread to think of the jet lag-induced rage monster I would become—rumours suggesting that Nvidia graphics card prices will increase by as much as 30% already have me howling.
Anyway, this late capitalist hell pit only gets better, because there’s still another way to save on that MSRP. For one thing, Nvidia will be awarding a GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition GPU to the player that comes out top in its Quake III Arena RTX Remix and DOOM: The Dark Ages — Revelations challenges. Winners of the QuakeCon Mod Contest will also receive an RTX 50-Series GPU.
Uh, so yes, the tip here is either ‘get good’ or make a really cool rig if you’d rather not spend silly money on a 50-series graphics card. Or happen to live close by QuakeCon and chance a detour. If it’s all the same to you, though, I won’t be taking any of my own advice on how to get a more sensibly priced GPU.
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