RTX 5090 Street Prices Top $9k as Nvidia GPU Costs Climb

Kevin_Flynn

I just did a cost breakdown of owning a GPU vs paying for tokens. An RTX 5060 Ti 16GB card costs about $800 on Amazon right now. Running 18.4 hours a day ( off peak electric rate schedule ) it can process approximately 109.3 million tokens per month. The card has a 90 day return window. Credit card interest + electricity puts the cost at $80 total out of pocket, to use this card for 3 months and return it. Paying an AI provider came out to $1,639.50 for the same 3 months of 18.4 hour a day usage. You know its a bubble when ... $80 vs $1,639.50 I understand that if you're a major corporation, or a researcher that needs 100+ gpus for a large project, unless you have access to your own supercomputer, the economics will be different. This was for "individual coder at home" scenarios. tl;dr ... im exploiting jeff bezos, and math is racist. too funny. I guess people have never heard of "options" before. I optioned a video card for 90 days. My bad.

TechTechTech

We configured 6 machines each having 2x5090 for local Qwen3.8 in the past months. Prices are very high. The performance of local AI for coding, given correct setup & harness, is very good and on par for 95% of use cases compared to closed models. Local usage for end-users is unmetered and token speeds are very fast and keep improving every few weeks due to optimizations being done in the community. Data remains local which makes EU compliance checkboxes way easier since data never touches anything related to the CLOUD act.

TrackerFF

Wrote a couple of days ago: I decided to check out what a top gaming PC would cost. $12.5k! Absolutely nuts. I have gamer friends that make bank, the types that have always bought the latest flagship parts at launch, and even they slowing down, because they feel the prices are extortionate. We're back to early 90s prices. EDIT: Yes, obviously you don't need a RTX5090 to play games. But it seems to me like the top GPU market is now exclusively for the local LLM users.

grommz

Moore Threads Lushan GPU will be out by the end of this year with 64GB RAM.

bovermyer

As someone whose gaming PC is now over six years old, I am very nervous that my GPU is going to crap out on me, because I won't be able to afford to replace it.

prmoustache

it is funny how all this is only driven by ram. From a 5070ti with 16GB of ram at less than 1500€ to a 5090ti with 32GB of ram at 12500€ you get nearly a factor of 10x with the rtx pro at 24GB of ram sitting below 4000€.

mickeyp

The 5090 is a firecracker of a GPU. RAM of course is a part of this; but it's also just... a really good card. I bought it ostensibly for gaming and light AI, but now I use it for Qwen 3.8 27B running in ninfer and in (shameless plug) dreamcoder.ai it absolutely flies. I get ~2-3k per second prefill (important for large contexts), 256k context and ~150 tok/s. I have 30 years of coding experience. That tiny model is no Opus 5.5, but make no mistake: it's a very strong coder in the hands of a capable developer.

ticulatedspline

I lament not splurging for the 5090 back when I built my machine, I figured it would only increase in value (even used) but it was hard to swallow the price at release which was already expensive and way above MSRP.

rwz

I think the discrete GPUs as a concept is coming to an end. Computer graphics is shifting more and more to using local AI-like things like DLSS that allows to hard-render simpler geometry and shadows and then apply AI-realism filters in real-time. It's harder and harder to justify gaming PCs having separate pools of GPU-only memory and "everything else" RAM. I think unified memory is the obvious next step for personal computing and vendors will be coming up with solutions that enable more modular approach to building enthusiast grade upgradable personal computers.

scotty79

Anyone has an idea when will it unclog even a little bit? When is the next NVIDIA lineup comming out? Are they going to release any middle of the road products like strong AMD Insights?