All figures are US new retail, tax excluded, from Market Watch's own tracked observations, August 19 through October 1. That start date is not arbitrary: it is when a collector upgrade changed how prices get sampled, so comparisons that span it are not reliable and this report does not make them.
The RTX 5090 has held above three times MSRP since mid-September
The RTX 5090's daily median ran $4,600 to $4,900 through the last third of August on two to four sources a day, about 2.3 to 2.5 times its $1,999 launch MSRP. Its first reading above three times MSRP ($5,997) came on September 15, at $6,395. It was at $6,800 the next day and has held between $6,700 and $6,800 since, about two weeks running, rather than correcting back. The one exception is a single day, September 30, when three sources read a median of $4,800 before the price was back at $6,693 the next day on two sources; our own anomaly check flagged that day as an isolated reversion, and it is marked on the chart rather than folded into the trend.
That holding pattern is the new information here. A week before this report, this desk found that only one US shop, Amazon, still carried the 5090 in stock, after the other three dropped out between September 1 and 3, and that Amazon's own listing had reached $6,700 by September 25. The concentration story may still be true, but the price itself did not retreat when some of those listings did return to the tracker over the following week: the median is still $6,700 to $6,800, now on two sources some days instead of one. The card is up 33 percent over the last 30 days on the tracker's own figure and sits at roughly 3.3 to 3.4 times its launch MSRP.
RTX 5090 US retail price versus launch MSRP
- RTX 5090
What this chart shows
The 5090 stepped from roughly 2.4 times MSRP to roughly 3.4 times MSRP between late August and mid-September, then held there. September 30’s dip reversed within a day and is excluded from the trend read.
Entry and mid-range GPUs are climbing too, though less than the 5090
The 5090 is the extreme case, but it was not alone. Every GPU in the tracked US set with a reliable 30-day trend moved up, not down, over the same window:
| Card | Launch MSRP | 90-day median | Latest daily median | Tracker 30-day change | Samples |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RX 9060 XT 8GB | $299 | $429.99 | $459.99 (Sep 29) | +21.1% | 19 |
| Arc B580 | $249 | $309.99 | $349.99 (Sep 29) | +6.5% | 42 |
| RX 9060 XT 16GB | $349 | $509.99 | $499.99 (Sep 28) | +8.5% | 69 |
| RX 9070 XT | $599 | $759.99 | $834.99 (Sep 28) | +8.1% | 74 |
| RTX 5050 | $249 | $399.99 | $359.99 (Sep 29) | +7.9% | 51 |
The Arc B580 shows the clearest step pattern: flat at $309.99 (its 90-day median) through the first half of September, then $329.99 from September 15, then $349.99 by September 28 to 29, each step held for several days across two to four sources. That is a 12.9 percent rise end to end, a separate read from the tracker's own 30-day figure above, which compares a shorter and more recent window. The RTX 5050 is the noisiest of the group: it peaked at $419.99 on September 25 before easing back to $359.99 on September 29, so the direction is up over the window but not a clean climb day to day. None of this stack is anywhere near correcting toward launch pricing.
CPUs mostly didn't move, with two exceptions
Tracked CPUs mostly moved less than 5 percent over the same window; two AMD mainstream parts were the exceptions. The Ryzen 7 7700X climbed from a $240 daily median in late August to $319 by September 29, each reading backed by four sources, a 33 percent move that still leaves it under its $399 MSRP. The Ryzen 5 7600X moved a noisier 12 percent over the same stretch, bouncing between $164 and $199 with no clean direction, and stayed well under its $299 MSRP throughout. Nothing else in the CPU lane is worth a claim this month.
An outside read: memory supply is the most likely pressure, not proof of it
Memory points the same way. The Corsair Vengeance 32GB DDR5-6000 CL30 kit held at $509.99 from late August through the first week of September, then stepped to $559.99 and has stayed there, up 9.8 percent over 30 days on 11 samples across four sources.
Micron and Samsung executives both said this week that the DRAM and HBM shortage driving memory prices up will not ease for years. Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told investors supply "is only getting tighter" and that most of the company's 2027 output is already sold, mainly to AI and server customers; Samsung's Kim Taewoo said HBM will take close to 30 percent of DRAM makers' wafer capacity in 2027, up from 20 percent this year, leaving less for consumer parts. Ars Technica, which carried both executives' comments, also noted the same pressure has already pushed up prices for prebuilt PCs and other consumer devices.
That is a real, dated, attributed account of a DRAM shortage, and it lines up directionally with our own RAM figure this month. It is not proof of anything about the RTX 5090: GDDR is itself a graphics-specific type of DRAM, distinct from the general-purpose DRAM and the HBM discussed in that reporting, and nothing in the coverage names GPU pricing specifically. The most that can honestly be said is that the same memory-fab capacity crunch plausibly sits upstream of both stories, GPUs and RAM, without this report being able to separate how much of the 5090's move is that pressure, scalping, or thin stock concentrating on one shop at a time.
Sources
- Ars Technica: Micron and Samsung on the DRAM shortage through 2028 (October 1, 2026)