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Nvidia Sells RTX 50-Series Founders Edition GPUs at MSRP During PAX West

2 outlets9/6/2026

The short version

At PAX West in Seattle, Nvidia is offering RTX 5070, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics cards at original MSRP pricing, a rare opportunity as third-party card prices have soared far above list price.

via TechPowerUp

At PAX West, held at the Seattle Convention Center, Nvidia is offering GeForce RTX 50-Series Founders Edition graphics cards at their original MSRP prices while supplies last. The RTX 5070 Founders Edition is priced at $549, the RTX 5080 Founders Edition at $999, and the flagship RTX 5090 Founders Edition at $1,999. GeForce Trading Cards Series 1 packs are also available at the event.

The offer was announced by Jacob Freeman, Nvidia's GeForce Evangelist, who posted about it on X, inviting interested attendees to find him at the show to get a GPU at MSRP.

These prices stand in sharp contrast to current market rates for AIB (add-in board) versions of the same GPUs. Third-party RTX 5070 cards currently sell for around $850, RTX 5080 cards for $1,600 and up, and RTX 5090 cards for more than $5,000 — with some price tracking showing the RTX 5090's median list price sitting above $5,000, up from about $4,699.99 recorded earlier. Micro Center has reportedly offered some RTX 5090 units as low as $4,200.

The in-person MSRP sales tie into Nvidia's Verified Priority Access (VPA) program, a lottery system for Founders Edition cards originally launched in 2022 for RTX 40-series GPUs and revived in 2025 for the RTX 50-series. While sign-ups for the online lottery remain open, Nvidia has increasingly turned to offering MSRP-priced GPUs directly at live events; the company did something similar last month at QuakeCon in Austin, Texas.

Reports have also pointed to regional price increases for RTX 50-series GPUs outside the U.S., with median list prices rising as much as 39% recently — including a 29% jump for the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and a 36% jump for the RTX 5070. The RTX 5090, notable for its 32GB of GDDR7 memory that makes it useful for both gaming and AI inference, has been a particular flashpoint in these price increases. Nvidia itself does not have a booth at PAX West 2026, though several of its partners, including Starforge Systems, Razer, and Lenovo, are present at the event.

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