ASUS sent official notice to partners of price hike starting January 5th. (See link for ASUS letter).
This news from ASUS backs up reporting that RTX cards will see a significant price hike. RTX 5090 was reported as seeing as much as a $5000 price point
Meanwhile the CEO of Microsoft just said they have too much hardware for AI now and it's just sitting on shelfs.
"The more you buy, the more you save". He never mentioned what type of saving.
Maybe the AI bubble will crash and we'll get a massive influx of dirt cheap cards and ram, and PC building will be an affordable hobby once again.
Probably not though, because corporations are evil and everything always gets worse.
The type of cards and ram corporations are buying is generally not useful to consumers. The only way it helps would be by lowering demand for memory products if enough companies buy that used gear instead of new.
Yup. Fortunately this goes one of two ways:
- AI sticks around, and they finally build more fab capacity.
- AI does not stick around, and existing capacity is fine again.
Point being, there's so much money on the table that sooner or later they will build out the fab capacity, it just takes a LONG time to set up.
Fab capacity is also a national security issue for China and the US, so that's another reason fabs will grow.
And while this AI hardware won't be usable for consumers, a HUGE used market for AI hardware will put a lot of pressure on new AI hardware pricing, which is still very good for consumers.
So yes, terrible time to buy now. But good reasons to think it will get better in the future. Worth holding your breath for once, I think.
It takes a very long time, and after memory crashed following the drought/COVID build-ups manufacturers are very wary this time around. Especially since everyone knows this is an unsustainable bubble.
Yup, just wait a decade and you're all good!
The GPU itself is. We'll hack it together. Even board partners could buy them for cheap and resell as some special fan edition (EVGA coming back like that would be legendary though it remains a fun fantasy).
Not even the chinese market is up to scavenging HBM from 20,000$ GPU dies.
But if it somehow crashes, better to hand them down for recycling/upcycling rather than a landfill?
The GPUs used for enterprise-level AI are not the same we use for gaming. In fact, if you ever used a workstation-class GPU, you'll find that they're awful for games.
They also use a different type of RAM, I think - one meant strictly to be added to servers.
Same wafers though right?
I mean, I don't know the full fabrication process, but they're gonna have to figure out how to turn all those workstation class GPUs back into gaming GPus somehow - I don't know if the whole thing is reversible since I'm not an electrical engineer lol
Nah just like the housing market. They are forcing through artificial inflation and pricing just because they can. We will own nothing and we will pay for it.
They'd put all the stock into a chipper before they let the inflated price fall let us be realistic.
What will happen is 2 things. It will cause people to buy less high specs and people to join cloud gaming. I think the steam machine is going to end up being popular. Apparently it's based off your average specs most users have for steam games.
Many countries still have shitty interney it's not doable
Unless people want to be renting their toasters for the rest of their lives they should stop paying for subscription ANYTHING. These companies want to own everything you ever had and rent it to you.
There is no bubble to burst. Your are coping and arent ready for ai
Hoarding GPUs the way they used to hoard coders.
That hurts my soul
Due to lack of power.
So when you hear about anyone pushing for nuclear and more power? It's because they want to see AI servers get powered up.
Never forget.
We really need to talk about energy regulation again. What is tge priority list for power. It should be something like emergency services, essential services, people, etc, and at the very end, dats centers.
And private corps like Microsoft should never be permitted to own and operate nuclear power.
It's also weird that companies get crazy deals on power and water, while people struggle to pay their bills at comparably higher rates. No wonder companies feel comfortable blowing through municipal water if it's close to free.
Consumers can't just up and move en mass if they don't like the utility bill, so they have far less bargaining power.
Majority of US nuclear power plants are owned by private companies: https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-plant-owners-and-operators
If Microsoft/Google etc. major data center companies built their own nuclear powerplants I would see this as win-win. They would still be licensed and regulated like other privately operated nuclear plants.
Let me rephrase. A corp like Microsoft who is just going to use it to power more AI garbage for their own benefit, not powering the grid and prioritizing people (which, shockingly, corps still aren't actually people) should never receive the authorization to build power plants period.
Inevitably all the companies will.
If one company raises prices every other company is losing money if they don’t raise their prices. At least that’s what MBAs keep telling me.
Just make everything unaffordable at this point. And then just fire everyone. It'll be great for the economy if there's no one to buy stuff.
The goal for companies is to sell things to each other. It's similar to insurance. Why charge a person $2000 for a root canal when they can't afford it when you can charge their insurance $5000?
You can make way more money selling things at out of reach prices to companies than you ever could to a pleb working a 9-5
Where does the other company get the money to pay the first company from, then? Who creates the value that money represents?
the government just prints more money, duh. as long as everyone agrees something has a fixed-ish value, you can just print more money. USA mostly achieves that through their military. Works up to a point.
If anyone spends $5,000 on a video card, you're basically the worst.
I pretty much agree with this. But how many folks have we seen that are like, "check me out guys! I just picked up this build/card!" and it's another freaking Astral 5090 (usually paired with the stupid-ass seatbelt picture, or in a box stack with a needlessly expensive X870E motherboard, 9950x3d, Samsung 9100, etc).
So fools and their money are easily parted, especially when there's a flex to be had.
When you see that the top 10% are responsible for ~50% of consumer spending, it makes a lot of sense for a company that manufacturers luxury/hobby equipment to target that segment and milk them as much as possible. The other 90% be damned.
Are they really fools having built that before the increased price in ram, hard drives, and the upcoming GPU price increase?
Here is what is happening. They are pulling out of the competitive consumer market. They want to sell hardware to the venture capitalists who are investing in data centers because they are idiots with too much money to burn and will pay higher prices. It's not because of AI demand shortages, it's because it's a fools market that they want to fully invest in.
Did you miss 2020? 3090s were going for 5k on ebay.
I wasn't looking for video cards on eBay in 2020, not that it is any better, but those were also weird times and not the MSRP but scalpers, things are going to get rough.
That's the thing. The gap between the rich and the poor will continue to grow and prices will go up, so the poor are left out. Rich kids will be the ones enjoying the high end games, and the rest of us are stuck with whatever our cards will handle.
Its not going to just be this way with games. Its going to be EVERYTHING. Don't you see, these companies want to own everything, and rent it to you so that you are essentially a slave to their products.
This hobby’s going to go down the shitter thanks to our billionaire oligarchs. Hopefully developer’s just focus on what’s out there now. Forget future GPUs and consoles.
Great but how will you replace your current hardware if it breaks?
Just got a 5080 and I am keeping my 2070 Super just in case!
If we're being honest graphics plateued around the end of the ps4 era.
Pathtracing and all that is cool, but it's not necessary to make a good looking game and has a very high performance cost.
Yeah there hasn't really been a game recently that impresses me with graphics in the way generational leaps used to. Any game that has impressed me with its looks usually come from the art style more than straight up fidelity.
Witcher 3 is still one of the best looking games around and is 10 years old. Time for developers to emphasize optimization to reach their customer base.
Cyberpunk and Control are the two that immediately jump to mind. And Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition. But those are all long in the tooth at this point too.
I hear Alan Wake 2 is stunning but I haven't played it and don't really have any desire to.
Wait for Death Stranding 2 to be ported on PC. That's one of the few recently released games that genuinely looks next gen due to Decima engine making wonders while also running smooth as butter.
UE5 games pale in comparison.
I'm playing Death Stranding 1 right now. It's a fantastic looking game. I can't believe how old it is.
I just started AC shadows and the the hair is so silky smooth its unlike anything ive been used to in blocky cartoony video game hair.
and obviously the lighting and the dense foliage and high quality models on everything.
kcd2 was another game that showed me 2025 really is a huge leap in graphics. and of course all the obvious alan wake 2s and the like.
i feel like most people who say there hasnt been a leap have just been staying away from the breathtaking games. i havent started avatar as im waiting for the complete edition to have a good sale. Outlaws looks great except it still has some shimmering giving it that old not flawless look. meaning Shadows literally looks grounded in reality with no dancing backfipling gliches in the graphics. except the water looks noisy. but the surface looks fine unless so many other games. the noise seems deep in the water like it at the source of the reflection now on the water. so its easy to ignore. unless Outlaws where the surface on the sides of the water look like theres flying out and glitching.
and i havent even tried the new doom. by 2026 the massive leap is going to be hard to ignore. so can we just not.
Time for developers to emphasize optimization to reach their customer base.
But how will poor Nvidia sell more consumer gpus then! Lol
I guess that's the thing, component makers don't even care to sell to us anymore.
Consumer GPUs makes up less than 15% of their overall revenue these days…their strategy involves maximizing profits for that sector. Volume production is of course prioritizing industrial hardware for AI.
Sure, but even if Nvidia only cares about the 6080s and 6090s going forward if games are optimized it cuts down on the appeal of them.
New hardware just justifies developers becoming lazy and complacent with optimization at this point.
Yeah, Borderlands 4 is a prime example where a 5090 even can't hit stable 60fps 4k on ultra without dlss.
It's not like it even looks that much different than Borderlands 3 so it's not some Crysis level game that's really pushing graphics.
It's just devs doing the bare minimum to push the game out.
Exactly and Friggen Borderlands 3 runs on the Switch 1 well enough but they couldn't even get 4 to run properly on Switch 2 to the point where they delayed it indefinitely just shows how poorly optimized 4 is
It has been for a long time, in no small part due to its rising popularity. Newer PC gamers balk at the idea of having to manually install mods. They just want computers to be like consoles on the software side, and underpowered crap (5060 Ti being recommended, anyone) on the hardware side. A 7-year-old GPU should be obsolete but developers target these people's setups, not actually progressing the technology.
Buying a 5090 FE in August for MSRP looks less and less like it was a bad idea
Buying a rig with a 5070TI, 9800x3D and 32GB DDR5 back in April is looking like a very smart move by myself.
I hope it lasts at least a good 5 years but I'm not sure.
Why wouldn’t it last another 5?
I’m running a i9-9900K and 3070Ti that I bought second hand back in 2021. It still runs great. I can play new AAA games at high settings on 1440p. And I have a backlog of older games that I still need to play if we get to a point I can’t run AAA games that are coming out
Genuinely the only thing holding the 3070 series is the VRAM, otherwise my fiances 3070 rig is more than holding up
slap a 1080ti in the second gpu slot as a VRAM card. nvidia hates this quick easy trick.
That's why I upgraded to my RTX 4080, literally I knew I was getting killed on the VRAM, especially as I play VR games way more than the average person.
Just wish AM5 was a more stable platform, been having nothing but issues with it since getting it.
Running a 2080 Super from 2019. Runs well.
Most people who talk about buying the highest end new card as if it is a necessity are delusional. Almost no games are utilizing all that power.
I just stopped using my 3070 in November, that fells was still going strong in most games, it really was only hampered by its VRAM in the Sony games, it was playing Battlefield 6 really well, donated it to a neighbor who only plays Wizard 101, I think he'll be good for a long time, lol.
I have a 3080 paired with a 9900k and play on 1440p 144hz.Definitely feels like in some games its definitely jarring fps wise.
The 9900k simply can't maintain over 100fps with stable frametime in alot of games as it used too.
My biggest issue maintaining stable frame rates has been in flight sim and heavy VR games. I haven’t played flight sim since SU4 so it might have improved
I haven’t had issues on RDR2 or Starfield.
You not playing new AAA games with high settings at 1440p on a 3070ti fam, stop it.
Redditors always get at least double the performance out of their PC gear.
To be fair, they didn’t say what FPS they are targeting. They could definitely achieve 60 FPS with that set up on high with DLSS.
Same everything but 3080 and literally only elden ring has run <60fps
3070 Ti is literally on par with 9060 XT almost the same as 5060 Ti when it comes to raster performance, on non vram heavy AAA games it is certainly possible especially with DLSS turned on.
Setting DLSS to performance or ultra performance and turning on frame generation makes a lot of things possible so long as the reduction in image quality doesn't bother you.
I’m playing Starfield on high settings right now. At the most I think i might have bumped shadows down to medium
Built the same rig back in March. I already felt uneasy about how much it cost at the time but now I know I definitely made the right choice.
I did that exactly same thing and I couldn’t be more pleased.
There hasn't been a meaningful jump in power since the 30 series, and we're now hearing a new console generation is being delayed as about now is when they start making deals for parts, and RAM has shot up.
You'll be fine.
Should do easily. Might have to resort to DLSS+FG to do it at 4K but at 1440p it'll be great 5 years from now.
Oh sweet. I'm running 1440p. 😊
I’m the same here. Looking like the best idea I’ve had for ages.
Just bought a MSI refurb prebuilt. 5070ti, 32gb ram, 9900x hope it lasts a long time.
Black Friday /Cyber whatever, the day before Micron announcement for me, was going to wait until next year, but heard prices might start to suck, glad I listened
same! but a 5060 ti.
so i just texted my buddy telling him to get ready to buy my 5060ti cause i just ordered a 5070ti.
(he buys my older stuff when i upgrade)
I did exactly the same thing, except I did it right before the prices started rising, so a few months or so ago
Bought my components during Black Friday “sales” week. Could be worse honestly, as overall total on components would have increased over $500 as of today, and it’s only going to get worse.
Ya using the pay in 4 thing to get a 5080 feels like getting the last chopper out of Vietnam at this point.
I got a 5090, 9800x3D, and 64 GB prebuilt in October for a good deal I'm feeling like Nostradamus
I would feel better about it if I had bought the 96 GB I was eyeing at about the same time, instead I settled for 32 from microcenter on a "deal" (just 200$)
32 should be good for a good long amount of time imo
yep i got a 5070 TI OC in early December, it was 200$ off on sale.
don't feel too stupid now
Despite what Reddit wants you to believe the 4090 FE and 5090 FE were always great deals if you had a use for a graphics card that powerful. You could never buy them new below MSRP and you can sell them used for nearly the same price you bought them when you upgrade.
Lmao
Clowns
unfortunately this is actually a smart (or rather, no-brainer) move on their part. as the other commenter said, they literally have no choice but to do this, as if they didn't then they wouldn't be competitive with other manufacturers who do and risk bankruptcy. consumers aren't where the money is these days.
TLDR you don't hate AI, you hate capitalism.
Can we hate both?
You can, but unfortunately it's going to cost you at least double
Double sounds like a bargain these days.
I hate both the system, and the product driving the changes to that system, for different reasons
I hate agentic LLMs for plenty of reasons.
Kinda funny to me that this is the prevailing mentality.
Not disagreeing at all, but you'd think one of these companies would announce price hikes, wait for everyone else to raise their prices, and then either cancel or revert their price hikes. People are talking about not purchasing a new computer for years at this point.
They could onboard so many new people onto the Asus ecosystem and push whatever AI garbage they want, and could make way more money while at the same time being the company that resisted the price hikes or whatever.
Just commenting though lmao. I'm simply a VC/investment consultant who also just happens to be a staunch socialist. I often try to suggest similar strategies to my clients, and very few ever care about more than the immediate, 100% gauranteed cash - even if the alternative is 10x more at a 99.9% chance. There's very little risk in capitalism, which is one indicator that it has outlived its purpose
And?
They're clowns for responding to market pressure? AI/Data Center demand is making consumer development a losing proposition unfortunately, they're just doing what they HAVE to do
Ahh Asus and January price hikes. I still remember they were the first ones to do it in Jan 2021
I mean, They likely have to because of the data center bullshit. It’s not like their cost to produce cards is going down.
I hope my 4090 outlives me
all not super rich titan users coming together in the year 3033 in line at computer stores.
member when we could buy titan gpus at 90 tier prices? now we gotta buy titan gpus at enterprise prices.
Just charge $1 million for everything at this point. Let's get to the endgame already.
You can charge whatever you want, people just aren't going to be able to pay for it. I can say my used boots are worth $10k; doesn't mean anyone's going to give me that for them.
Dude…. Fuck a.i
The source of that $5000 rumor doesn’t seem particularly trustworthy to me, and there have been no other corroborating sources as far as I know, so I’d take it with a grain of salt for now. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some price hikes considering the memory situation, but that seems way out of proportion.
Good thing I've stopped playing new AAA games, I suppose.
What were we expecting lmao, people are still gonna buy it anyway
only a few years ago the idea of a TITAN GPU sitting at £2,400 over £1,100 for an xx80 Ti was insane and ridiculous
now we got people willing to spend (at least) £1,000 more for an ASSUS 5090 model which is exactly the same as the £2k FE in performance.
the majority who buy mid range rigs are now paying top tier pricing, the bar to entry is so high its little wonder why handhelds were gaining traction.
2026 will be.. interesting.
Nah I doubt it. Jobs are getting hard to come by and 5K is the price of a used car.
Obviously someone will buy it but at the end of the day consumer graphics cards are toys for a large amount of people.
The prices are because of scarcity, but AI is a bubble that's gonna burst sooner rather than later (I'm not saying it's not here to stay, but it's current state is clearly unsustainable).
Well shit I'm still on a 2070S, guess I'm not playing new games any more.
You're not playing new cods and acs. You can still play amazing new indie games at least
Still a decent card. If you don't mind medium settings and DLSS you might be surprised what it can handle.
It's still chugging along that's for sure.
At this point dont buy shit from them let then sit on shelfs for years
Xbox cursing in the other room because their partnership is about to implode lol.
I'm going to get every bit of use out of my RTX 2060 Super
I jumped from a 1080 TI to a 4080 Super. Let's see how long I can stretch things til the next upgrade.
Got 5 years out of my 2060 so far, here's to another 5 and beyond
I’m hardly in the worst of it but yea my 3080 TI is basically going to be how I treat my cars. Until the wheels fall off.
My RTX 2060 Super has been incredible. For my first gaming PC which is a prebuilt, I do plan on building my own, has been fantastic. The o ly game my rig hasn't been able to handle is Starfield wicj we all know is mediocre at best.
Just when pc sales were seeing all time highs. More and more people going pc. Unfortunately, all of these hikes will tank that for the next couple years. It’s so sad. This won’t just be pc though. Everything is going to cost way too much for the avg consumer.
The base ps6 is probably going to cost $800.
A ton of people either didn't make the jump from ps4 to ps5 or waited until cross platform releases more or less completely stopped.
So I see a ton of people just sticking with ps5 long after the ps6 release.
It's not like 8k is that affordable/common yet, so for an average user there's not a ton of motivation to get ps6 as long as cross platform compatibility continues.
$800 just a month ago would have seemed to be just at the cusp of what’s reasonable. Today that sounds like a deal. Steam Machine however… sounds like there’s no hope.
gaming with your own hardware (including consoles) is dead within 10 years
At least there’s endless classic games to play out there that don’t need high end rigs. I could play Doom .wads the rest of my life and never run out of content.
Emulation offers infinite possibilities
No way, look at all the old tech still in use today. Even record players are still very popular.
Because AI data centers don't run on record players.
More like games will have to become way more optimized or keep the same level of tech so that people with lower end rigs can still buy it.
Im so glad I updated my computer all over this year.
When people say that the 5090 people will cost $5000 is that meant to be whatever the base price is or do they mean like those crazy matrix models Asus was selling for like ridiculous price? Because if it’s the laughter that feels like a kind of disingenuous way to say this, I think we already have some models that are like $4000 then. If it’s the base price, oh my God, we are screwed.
Base price. AMD is following suit. We are fucked.
I literally just need my graphics card to finish my build. 😭
Prices right now are actually pretty decent. Rx 9070xt prices have been at all time lows.
3-4 months ago it was at an all time low and you were able to get the Powercolour Hellhound 9070XT for 630€ now every GPU was pushed up by 40-60€. Next year its only going to get higher.
Console and GPU somehow only got more expensive after launch instead of becoming cheaper. Fuck this generation of hardware.
Still better then right after they released, 9070xt was selling for $800 when you could even find them in the US.
Yeah thats true. Tho the first few were at MSRP but only so AMD could say they were selling it as the most affordable GPU.
Yeah, I had to buy a rtx 5070 because of that. I wanted a rx 9070 but they can f off before I pay $200 over msrp.
5070 was around msrp at the time so just gave up and got that.
Buy it asap.
Trying... But life keeps coming up with shit to cover or pay for
Well lets hope my 4080FE doesnt catch fire in the near future.
sometimes i start to wonder if these companies just take news headlines as an opportunity to squeeze extra profit for no reason
And soon the others will follow as well, since part shortages will affect everyone. It's like everything in the world in only changing for the worse. I even kinda saw this coming and planned to upgrade, but my last possible way to get money went down in smoke. So i guess i will be stuck with rx580 for the rest of my life and prey that developers will not increase requirements for at least some games, and will have to hope that network card and usb ports on motherboard dying is not a singnal of something bad happening to the board itself, and that rapid ssd wear is just a glitch of sort. Otherwise i will have to downgrade for some even older components...
This world is so magnificent, every new day it manages to create new reasons to hate existance even more than before. And people who would easily set up the world on fire if that will allow to increase their hoarded wealth that they will never use anyway. And then, when all the PC tech will become unaffordable and the AI will need their server gear no more, they will sell us cloud gaming. With unskippable ads, pay-per-minute, mandatory subscriptions and other wonders of uncontrolled capitalism. You will own nothing, but it will cost you everything.
You dont hate AI enough
I have a 5090 I bought at $2200. I’m running that thing until it dies. I’m 1000% skipping the 6 or even 7th generation of Nvidia cards
Why wouldn’t you, it’s not as if there will be a vast improvement with those generations regardless.
AMD is also increasing prices.
Electronics will be a rich person's product in the next year.
You were the chosen one!
Bought a laptop with a 5070ti on the 22nd of December and always wondered if I should have waited for January. Now I have my answer.
Guys I was gonna wait another year before building my PC, should I just build it now if everything’s going to keep getting more expensive?
Impossible to totally predict the future of course, but signs now would point to yes
Source is garbage
Thank god I bought a card this Black Friday, i got burned by the ram increases but worth to finished the build just for peace of mind
lol
hugging and kissing my 3080 right now.
I really wanted to upgrade to like a 4070 or something but i guess im just fucked. I hope these companies end up having to sell their overpriced shit stock for pennies in a few years. That will be when i upgrade.
Tried selling my rig with a spec sheet including. hvan420, 5090fe, 9800x3d, 64gb 6000mh dominator and a 3tb 990 drive. Not a single sniff. At £4300!
Could now be the time? 👀
That's close to 6000 USD I wouldn't even pay high 2000 USD. Wild price.
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I'm so glad My brother, myself, and my friend all built new PCs earlier this year.
We all went all in for the long haul. 9800x3d, 5090, 64gb DDR5 ram, 4 - 8 tb of NVmes builds.
These expensive ass builds are looking like it wasn't such a bad purchase going into 2026. Now I just have to find more time to play games.
How much total were your builds?
Glad I got the 5090 Astral last month