Let's be honest, last week's Amazon Prime Day sales were disappointing fare to those hoping for a good graphics card deal. Sure, prices came down, almost across the board, but there were very few great deals.
So when I did my weekly check of GPU prices this morning, I was pleasantly surprised by it all. Only two models (the 16 GB variants of the RX 9060 XT and RTX 5060 Ti) have gone back up in price, and almost every other card is sporting the same price as this time last week.
Bar five, that is, which have prices that are either a little bit lower or a lot bit lower. If that makes sense. Anyway, without further ado, here are the fantastic five.
Quick links
- GeForce RTX 5050 | $250 @ Best Buy
- Arc B580 | $270 @ Newegg
- GeForce RTX 5070 Ti | $780 @ B&H Photo
- GeForce RTX 5080 | $1,300 @ Newegg
- GeForce RTX 5090 | $2,500 @ Amazon
GeForce RTX 5050
Kicking things off is the GeForce RTX 5050, a graphics card that we're still waiting for review samples of to test. And I also have to confess that at the beginning of Amazon Prime Week, the little Blackwell GPU sold for this exact same price. However, by the end of the week, it was a good $20 more expensive. This deal just puts things back to how they should be.
Not that I'd recommend you buy one. While it's another $50 on top, the GeForce RTX 5060 would be a far better choice, or you could browse the second-hand market for a tidy RTX 3070 Ti, which would leave it for dust in games, though you don't get any frame generation tech.
So not a great start, but don't worry, things do get better, I promise.
Arc B580
The brand might be new to you, but the GPU underneath the cooler is just the same as any other Arc B580 graphics card. That means it'll perform as well as any other Arc model, though the fact that this deal is only for this specific color might put some of you off. And there's the whole nature of Intel's Battlemage GPU and its drivers to contend with as well, which will cut down the level of interest further.
At launch, the Arc B580's performance was all over the place—sometimes ahead of an RTX 4060, sometimes behind, and sometimes constantly crashing to desktop. It's a better situation now, thanks to Intel's continuous driver releases, but there will always be games that really don't like Arc GPUs.
But there are plenty that do and when everything is working all fine and dandy, this $270 graphics card has plenty of 1080p gaming poke. Hey, at least it has 12 GB of VRAM, so nyer to the 5050 on that point.
GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
With the two cheap GPUs out of the way, let's mosey on over to the end of the wallet spectrum, starting with—in my not-so-humble opinion—the best of the whole bunch, a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.
This is by far the best model out of the entire RTX 50-series lineup, and while the xx70 cards were traditionally best for 1440p gaming, the 5070 Ti can easily turn its hand to 4K. Sure, you'd want to throw on some upscaling to get higher frame rates, but you'd be doing that with more powerful GPUs anyway.
The 5070 Ti's real party trick, though, is overclocking and hoo boy, does it love a healthy dose of clock speed tweaks. If you're willing to spend time going down the undervolting rabbit hole, you can really boost things right up.
From its launch, the biggest problem with the 5070 Ti has been the price. Nvidia set the MSRP to $749, which add-in board vendors promptly ignored, with the cheapest models going for well over $850. We're not quite down to MSRP just yet, but this deal is only $30 over, and if you're happy to spend over seven hundred bucks on a GPU, what's another thirty?
Out of all these deals here, this is the one I'd go for in a flash. Mind you, if you bought one last week in the sales, you might feel a tad upset to see it $50 cheaper.
GeForce RTX 5080
I really want to like the GeForce RTX 5080. I've used one on and off in a test rig for a good while, and it's genuinely a fast and capable graphics card. Taken in isolation, I can't imagine anyone being disappointed with how well it runs. The problem is that this card doesn't exist in a universe entirely by itself, and compared to the last-gen RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super, it's a miserable upgrade.
And just as with the RTX 5070 Ti, it's been sold since launch with a vastly over-inflated price tag. Technically, this deal is lower than those during Amazon Prime Day week (what a stupid name...day...week...pick one, Amazon) by a not-insignificant $100, but it's still way too much money to be spending on a graphics card. Certainly not while the RTX 5070 Ti exists, at least.
Still, at least it's not an RTX 5090.
GeForce RTX 5090
Well, what can I say here? We all know about the GeForce RTX 5090's capabilities; we know it sports a monstrous amount of VRAM, packs a ridiculous number of shaders, and eats electrical energy like almost nothing else. All 5090 graphics cards, bar Nvidia's Founders Edition model, are comically huge and swallow the volume inside your PC case like a GPU black hole.
Even the MSRP is ludicrous, weighing in at $1,999. However, that only applies to the Founders Edition, and every other 5090 variant has been way more expensive. So how on Earth can this be a 'deal' if you're paying 25% more for the behemoth? Well, it's a deal in the sense that this is the cheapest RTX 5090 around or rather, it's cheaper than it was by the end of Prime week. Sorry, Day. Ugh, last week.
Fun-fact trivia time. Did you know that this isn't the most expensive gaming graphics card that Nvidia has ever released? Launched in 2014, the dual-GPU GeForce GTX Titan Z had an asking price of $2,999. So did the Titan V in 2017, though arguably that wasn't really a gaming card. The 2018 Titan RTX looked positively cheap by comparison as it cost a mere $2,499.
Anyway, so yes. The RTX 5090. Stupidly big, stupidly powerful, and stupidly expensive. Perhaps the perfect graphics card for today's world, right?
👉Check out our full guide👈
1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070
2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB
3. Best budget: Intel Arc B570
4. Best mid-range: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
