When it comes to the RTX 3090 Ti graphics card, rumored to be arriving at the end of March, there’s been a good deal of speculation about how high Nvidia might go with the price tag – and a fresh leak points to a worst-case scenario.
As aired by @momomo_us, a well-known hardware leaker on Twitter, early product listings from a Canadian retailer suggest a price of just over $4,000 (US) when currency conversions are applied (that’s around £3,100, or AU$5,500).
🇨🇦 pic.twitter.com/DcAJHtxYlLMarch 18, 2022
That’s for an Asus ROG Strix model, with a TUF version coming in about 10% cheaper, but still with a towering price tag. Both are alarming indications, but nothing more than that – they could be placeholder pricing from the retailer, and may not be anywhere close to the recommended price Nvidia intends to pin on this graphics card.
Remember that the RTX 3090 has an MSRP of $1,500 (£1,399, or around AU$2,000), and so asking more than double this seems a pretty ridiculous state of affairs for a graphics card which is hardly going to blow the existing 3090 away.
Analysis: This does line up with previous leaks – and that’s a touch concerning
So, this kind of pricing seems highly unlikely, but then again, the slightly worrying thing is that this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen colossal price tags attached to the incoming RTX 3090 Ti. Previous leaked pricing from European retailers has suggested asking prices of around $3,500 to $4,500 (after currency conversions), so pretty much in line with this leak.
Even though that’s the case, we still wouldn’t read too much into all this. That said, Nvidia’s recommended pricing, and the price that the 3090 Ti actually ends up selling for could be quite different. Major inflation has been a hallmark of real-world GPU prices for a long time now, although the good news is that this situation does seem to be calming down of late.
Still, the RTX 3090 Ti is going to be something of a big strain on the wallet, one way or another, and for the improvement it represents over the vanilla 3090, as we’ve argued before, it does seem rather late in the day to be splashing that much cash on a top-end GPU when Nvidia’s next-gen isn’t that far off. And going by the rumor mill, the RTX 4090 (if that’s what it ends up being called) will be a great deal more powerful than the Ampere flagship or its Ti variant, so it would seem very much worth waiting for.
Via PC Gamer
