Nvidia Is Full of Shit

Summary

Since the disastrous launch of the RTX 50 series, NVIDIA has been unable to escape negative headlines: scalper bots are snatching GPUs away from consumers before official sales even begin, power connectors continue to melt, with no fix in sight, marketing is becoming increasingly deceptive, GPUs are missing processing units when they leave the factory, and the drivers, for which NVIDIA has always been praised, are currently falling apart. And to top it all off, NVIDIA is becoming increasingly insistent that media push a certain narrative when reporting on their hardware.What’s an MSRP anyway?Just like with every other GPU launch in recent memory, this one has also been ripe with scalper bots snatching up stock before any real person could get any for themselves. Retailers have reported that they’ve received very little stock to begin with. This in turn sparked rumors about NVIDIA purposefully keeping stock low to make it look like the cards are in high demand to drive prices. And sure enough, on secondary markets, the cards go way above MSRP and some retailers have started to bundle the cards with other inventory (PSUs, monitors, keyboards and mice, etc.) to inflate the price even further and get rid of stuff in their warehouse people wouldn’t buy otherwise—and you don’t even get a working computer out of spending over twice as much as a GPU alone would cost you.Newegg selling the ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 for $3,359 (MSRP: $1,999)eBay Germany offering the same ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 for €3,349,95 (MSRP: €2,229)I had a look at GPU prices for previous generation models for both AMD and NVIDIA as recently as May 2025 and I wasn’t surprised to find even RTX 40 series are still very much overpriced, with the GeForce RTX 4070 (lower mid-tier) starting at $800 (MSRP: $599), whereas the same money can get you a Radeon RX 7900 XT (the second best GPU in AMD’s last generation lineup). The discrepancy in bang for buck couldn’t be more jarring. And that’s before consi...