Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti pricing has leaked from some European retailers, and it seems the new flagship graphics card could perhaps take a chunkier bite out of your wallet than you might expect compared to the vanilla RTX 3090 (although then again, you may well have prepared yourself for the worst anyway, if you were mulling buying this new top-end Ampere offering).
As VideoCardz reports, purported prices have been spilled from at least two Swiss retailers and a German outlet (or at least the site is in German), and converted pricing (from Swiss Francs or Euros) gives a range of price tags from about $3,500 (around £2,560, or AU$4,860) to $4,500 (around £3,290, or AU$6,240).
Admittedly, two of the four prices mentioned – all of which are for MSI’s GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Suprim X, except in one case, where it’s MSI’s Gaming X Trio model – are at the lower end of the scale, but clearly these are going to be costly cards if these retailers are correct.
Naturally, we must be very cautious around any pre-release pricing, because often these tags can be mere placeholders, or to put it another way, guesswork, really. Certainly in the past such leaked figures have turned out to be wrong, but that said, even if errant, they can still be a useful ballpark figure.
Rather than try to rely on generally shaky currency conversions, VideoCardz also observes that in the case of the German site, an RTX 3090 (from Zotac) is listed for comparative pricing, and the 3090 Ti from MSI (Gaming X Trio) is 31% more expensive. That could be a more telling comparison, but again, exercise a great deal of caution around all of this.
Analysis: The specter of thin supply and price inflation looms again
We didn’t really expect anything but a weighty asking price for the RTX 3090 Ti, of course, and it’s a fair guess that supply-wise, retailers likely aren’t going to be getting a large number of them – what with Nvidia’s ongoing inventory and production woes that aren’t expected to resolve until the second half of this year – so retailers will be looking to maximize profits on the stock they do receive. (Also, remember the most recent 3090 Ti news we heard, about purported production snags which may delay the arrival of the Ampere GPU – it’s expected, or was expected, to pitch up at the end of January).
If a price jump in the order of 30% does come to pass for the 3090 Ti – bearing in mind the caveats we’ve already underlined above – the performance increase the card provides at these dizziest heights of GPU pricing isn’t likely to add up. Particularly when as one VideoCardz reader points out in the comments, for around the same money (in US dollars) you can buy an Alienware gaming PC with not just an RTX 3090, but a Core-i9 11900KF CPU and all the other trimmings (including 32GB of system RAM).
Such is the world of graphics card pricing we live in today, but that said, there will still be PC enthusiasts out there willing to pay whatever it takes to get the top dog Ampere card, no doubt.
