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The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 graphics cards reportedly won’t be available for the $999 MSRP, and it’s apparently all down to low profit margins for third-party card manufacturers. That’s according to comments made on social media by hardware leakers, who suggest this particular Nvidia GPU is priced too low compared to the cost of manufacturing a card, with third-party graphics card makers struggling to make it work at the suggested price.
Nvidia is looking to continue to dominate the best graphics card market with its new GPUs, with recent leaked RTX 5080 benchmarks placing it ahead of the RTX 4080 Super. However, a troubled storm of RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 stock shortages, along with very high demand, could make these cards particularly hard to obtain for some time, especially at the prices that Nvidia is setting itself.
In a recent post on the Chiphell industry forum, leaker Wjm47196 shared some thoughts about the RTX 5080 price. Suggesting that the basic FE edition is already “100% out of stock” for gamers, Wjm47196 went on to say that the cause is because Nvidia has left third-party board partners with a very low gross profit margin after building the boards at the $999 MSRP price.
Wjm47196 speculates that the cost of the more expensive GDDR7 memory chips is being passed to the third-party card manufacturers, and that the issue of profitability will affect most of the RTX 5000 series. These comments were supported by another renowned hardware leaker, harukaze5719, who suggested in a post on X that gamers “shouldn’t expect [the RTX] 5080 will be sold at MSRP.”
An earlier RTX 5080 price leak, showing the cost for a range of Gigabyte cards from a Finnish retailer, suggested that the majority of them were priced above Nvidia’s $999 MSRP, with only one basic model card offered at that price. If Wjm47196’s comments are true, however, board manufacturers such as Gigabyte don’t have a huge incentive to manufacture the cheaper cards, due to the low profit margins, so we’d expect any stock of RTX 5080 cards at MSRP to sell very quickly indeed.
That’s before considering the significantly high demand that we expect to see for both cards when we reach the RTX 5090 release date. With campers already lining up outside brick-and-mortar stores to buy one of these cards, you might need to be quick off the mark if you’re planning to pick up one of these new cards yourself.
We can help you out here, however. Make sure to keep checking our where to buy 5080 guide for the latest available stock levels each day for this new graphics card.
