- The Nvidia RTX 5070 Founders Edition card will not be available today
- Nvidia has confirmed it will be coming at some point in March, 2025
- Availability is expected to be incredibly limited, as with other Blackwell cards
It's launch day for the RTX 5070 with the hotly anticipated midrange graphics card now (hopefully) available in the hands of gamers across the US, UK, and beyond. However, it's just AIBs on sale for now, as Nvidia has stated that while a Founders Edition model is coming, there's a bit of a way to go yet.
While the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 Founders Edition models shipped alongside partner variants (such as Gigabyte, Zotac, MSI, ASRock, Asus), the same cannot be said for the midrange Blackwell offering; Nvidia has confirmed the RTX 5070 Founders Edition model will be coming "later in March" with an exact date still to be determined (via Andreas Schilling on X).
According to this source, Nvidia told Schilling of the lack of Founders Edition availability just two and a half hours before the review embargo lifted. This leaves the availability of the Nvidia-made card into question. Historically, while both the Founders Edition models of the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 were technically available, they were even more ephemeral than their AIB counterparts (particularly in the US and the UK).
Traditionally, the Founders Edition models of Nvidia GPUs are most commonly found in the US through hybrid retailers (online and brick-and-mortar) such as Micro Center and Best Buy. Whereas in the UK, it's typically, only Nvidia's website (and in incredibly limited supply). We've seen the rest of the Blackwell lineup disappear from shelves near-instantly, and the same is looking likely of this one; despite (seemingly) reduced demand against the other three GPUs.
A lack of confidence for a troubled product
By all accounts, the RTX 5070 has failed to trailblaze the way that its predecessors (the RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4070) did in 2024 and 2023 respectively. We gave the latest Blackwell GPU a less-than-stellar 3-star write-up in our review, citing near-identical generational performance when compared to the RTX 4070 Super despite the jump to PCIe 5.0 and GDDR7 video memory, which were made (effectively) useless by the reduction in Compute Units and transistors overall.
The fact that Nvidia has decided to delay its Founders Edition of the cheapest card in the Blackwell lineup could be somewhat telling. It's possible it is preparing for a wider availability than was seen from the three other GPUs. However, this could be a strategic move considering tomorrow's launch of AMD's RX 9070 and 9070 XT, neither of which will feature a Reference (AMD-made) version. Could Nvidia be holding back to snipe its competition with the cheapest variants available? It's a possibility.
With all said, the RTX 5070 could be a worthwhile investment if you're upgrading from an older Ampere (RTX 30 series) or Turing (RTX 20 series) 70-class card for a massive two/three generational boost. Some partner cards may be hovering around the promised $549 mark, whereas others will inevitably be priced upwards of $600 depending on cooler size, overclocking potential, RGB, and more.
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