RTX 5080 and RX 9070 XT cost nearly 50% more than in August

In late August an RTX 5080 cost about $1,530 at US shops. Last week it was about $2,250, more than twice its $999 launch price. The RX 9070 XT made almost the same climb, from about $720 to $1,050, and neither card has given any of it back.

Not everything followed. The RTX 5060 and Arc B580 cost about what they did in the summer, and processors hardly moved at all. The prices below come from Market Watch’s daily checks at US shops, before sales tax, unless a figure is in euros.

The RTX 5080 sat still through September, then added $600 in October

For most of September the RTX 5080 was a dull chart: $1,590 to $1,600, day after day. October was a different story. The price crossed $2,000 on October 19 and ended the period around $2,250, about $600 more than at the start of the month. Twice in the last week a single listing asked $2,398. The earlier look at the card found $2,225 on October 26, so the climb has at least paused there.

The US price now comes from one or two shop listings a day, down from about four in September, so the exact figure jumps around. Europe agrees on the direction, though. In euros, as listed, the card is up about a third in Germany and the Netherlands and about half in France.

The RX 9070 XT climbs in steps, and the newest one is $150 tall

The RX 9070 XT does not drift. It jumps, then sits: about $740 in early September, $780 to $835 from the middle of the month, $900 to $940 for most of October, and $1,050 from October 29. That last step added $150 overnight and has held on every check since, so it looks like the new price rather than one odd listing. A card that launched at $599 now costs about $450 more than that. Germany, France and the Netherlands moved the same way, up 29% to 41%.

The plain RX 9070 is harder to pin down. Its US price flips between about $700 and $885 from one check to the next, so whether it is up 25% depends on which of the two you catch.

Mid-range cards rose 13% to 25%, while the RTX 5060 and Arc B580 held

Further down the range the increases are smaller, and two cards have hardly moved. The table compares the first week of the period with the last.

If you are shopping at this level, the RTX 5060 and Arc B580 are the steady ones: both cost about what they did in August. Steady is not the same as cheap, because the RTX 5060 was already 1.5 times its MSRP back then. The RTX 5070, now about $955, rose the most of the NVIDIA cards in the table. The B580 and RTX 5070 Ti have had few prices lately, so their figures are rough.

The RTX 5090 is now close to four times its launch price

The RTX 5090 made the biggest move of all, from about $4,830 to $7,940. Against its $1,999 MSRP that is nearly four times the launch price, up from about 3.35 times when last month’s report looked on October 1.

Take the US number loosely: in the last week it came from a single shop listing each day. France has far more prices for this card and shows the same climb, up about half, from about €4,980 to €7,440. The Netherlands is up by about as much.

Processors stayed put, and memory kits refuse to settle on a price

While graphics cards climbed, CPUs did almost nothing. Of the 21 we can compare, 16 are within about 5% of their August price and none rose by more than that. Five got cheaper, by 8% to 13%: the Core Ultra 5 245K, Ryzen 9 9950X3D, Ryzen 5 9600X, Core Ultra 7 265K and Ryzen 9 9900X. For most of them the August figure comes from a single day, so the exact percentages are rough.

Memory kits are another matter. They bounce between two price levels from one check to the next: the Crucial Pro 64GB DDR5-6400 kit was $704 on some October days and $1,080 to $1,200 on others. Until that settles, there is no memory trend to report.