Ahead of the big reveal expected at Nvidia's GTC keynote on September 20, it looks like we've already really seen the price of Nvidia's next flagship graphics card, the very powerful GeForce RTX 4090.
As reported by Twitter user @I_Leak_VN, it appears Vietnamese tech retailer AZPC Workstation is offering pre-orders for the RTX 4090, with two different GPU versions available. The "basic" version costs 50 million VND, while the "premium" model costs 60 million VND.
That works out to around €2100 for the base model (which is presumably a Founder's Edition card) and €2520 for the premium variant. It's unclear what "premium" means at this point, but we'd expect it to be a factory-overclocked model from a third-party manufacturer like MSI or Gigabyte.
AZPC Workstation Store offers the pre-order price of RTX 4090. I think this is the most realistic price because Vietnam also had this price when the new RTX 3090 was released.- Base version RTX 4090: 50 million VND (2100 USD) - RTX 4090 Premium Version: Peak 60 million VND (2520 USD). twitter.com/D3I23R1LkbSeptember 14, 2022
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Review: Titanic price for a Titan-class GPU, but don't panic
Costs up to €2,000 and up suggest a Titan-level graphics card. When the mighty RTX Titan launched in 2018, it was priced at €2,500, and the leaked details of the RTX 4090 that we have so far suggest that it will offer Titan-class performance.
Those are pretty ridiculous prices, considering the previous generation RTX 3090 initially sold for €1,500. There's a silver lining here, though: AZPC Workstation reportedly offered prices similar to these when the 3090 launched, so we could actually see US launch prices matching last-gen prices. . Import costs, recent local inflation and retailers' profit margins could explain the higher price.
The price could also be a smart preemptive move on the part of this retailer to counteract a very likely stockout. Even with the recent cryptocurrency crash bringing the GPU market back to (almost) normal, new Nvidia GPUs are likely to sell out very quickly upon release. I wouldn't be too surprised to see GPU lotteries make a comeback.
Still, even €1500 is a pretty bad sum for a bank account for a single graphics card. Personally, I'm not interested; the RTX 4080 will likely be the high-end GPU most enthusiasts can realistically aspire to, and I'm still hoping that Nvidia's September 20 announcement will also include a sneak peek at a more affordable RTX 4060.
The 4000-series GPUs will be so powerful that the average user should really be able to get great performance out of even the low-end cards. Hell, even most of the 3000 series cards are fantastic, and it looks like the prices on them are only going to go down. The RTX 4090 version could be the best time to buy a next-gen GPU!