Canadian Price Leak Puts RTX 3090 Ti at a Painful $4,000+

News
By Brandon Hill
published

The RTX 3090 Ti won't come cheap, which is just par for the course these days in GPU land.

RTX 3090
(Image credit: Asus)

The GeForce RTX 3090 Ti will soon arrive as the flagship entry in Nvidia's Ampere gaming GPU family. The company is rumored to announce the card on March 29th, and we're all eager to see what kind of performance it will deliver and how much it will cost. Regarding pricing, we're getting some additional insight into what customers may end up paying thanks to some price sleuthing by Twitter leaker @momomo_us.

Unfortunately, things already aren't looking too good for gamers. An unnamed Canadian retailer shows the Asus TUF Gaming RTX 3090 Ti and ROG Strix LC RTX 3090 Ti priced at 4,649 CAD and 5,234 CAD, respectively. The latter's insane price tag is directly attributed to its water-cooled design.

If we do a straight conversion to U.S. currency, we're looking at $3,680 and $4,143, respectively. Remember, these are just retailer prices and aren't indicative of what Nvidia's MSRP will be at launch. The "standard" RTX 3090 has an MSRP of $1,499 but currently sells for nowhere close to that price (unless you can grab one during Best Buy's infrequent drops). Despite a steady month-over-month drop in GPU prices, the RTX 3090 still averages $2,126 on third-party marketplaces like eBay.

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We're just guessing here, but we could easily see Nvidia charging around between $1,799 to $1,999 for the privilege of owning the fastest graphics card on the market, possibly more. After all, remember when the Titan RTX was priced at $2,499, or the even more extreme Titan V price of $2,999?

Given the average selling prices for the RTX 3090, the Canadian pricing for the RTX 3090 Ti seems to be right in line with what we would expect in scalper land. The Canadian pricing is also in line with figures from European retailers that we saw in early February. At the time, prices were listed between $3,968 and $4,193 when converted to U.S. dollars.

Nvidia's RTX 3090 Ti will allegedly feature a "full fat" GA102 GPU with 10,752 CUDA cores paired with 24GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory. With its increased core count and over 1 TBps of memory bandwidth, the RTX 3090 Wi should be a dominant force in the PC gaming sphere until Nvidia's inevitable RTX 4000 series arrives later this year.

We have the feeling that the RTX 3090 Ti will pick up right with its non-Ti version left off when it comes to dominating the Apple M1 Ultra's 64-core GPU. Just don't ask about power draw and efficiency.

Brandon Hill
Brandon Hill

Brandon Hill is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware. He has written about PC and Mac tech since the late 1990s with bylines at AnandTech, DailyTech, and Hot Hardware. When he is not consuming copious amounts of tech news, he can be found enjoying the NC mountains or the beach with his wife and two sons.

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14 Comments Comment from the forums
  • RealBeast
    Wow, that made my eyes water. :rolleyes:
    Reply
  • Friesiansam
    Perfect for willie-wavers with more money than sense!
    Reply
  • Conrad Orc
    I'd gladly pay the substantial markup to the manufacturers rather than fund the useless weasels who managed ruin an otherwise good thing. The companies allow amazing performance advances for mostly affordable $$$ but now have to raise the price rather than give opportunistic creeps free profit.
    Reply
  • rmicro1
    "Given the average selling prices for the RTX 3090, the Canadian pricing for the RTX 3090 Ti seems to be right in line with what we would expect in scalper land. "

    That's funny because that's what we Canadians call Canada as well (Scalper Land) since we often pay inflated prices for most products versus elsewhere.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    rmicro1 said:
    "Given the average selling prices for the RTX 3090, the Canadian pricing for the RTX 3090 Ti seems to be right in line with what we would expect in scalper land. "

    That's funny because that's what we Canadians call Canada as well (Scalper Land) since we often pay inflated prices for most products versus elsewhere.
    Beyond a hand full of people that just have to have the latest and greatest on day 1, this price isn't sustainable. With regular 3090's crawling towards $2000, no one is going to be interested in paying $2000 more for a 3090Ti. Scalpers are not going to like this card. There's only so many people desperate enough for that extra 10% more performance.
    Reply
  • Math Geek
    i believe the saying goes, "A FOOL and his money are soon parted!"
    Reply
  • blppt
    For $4000 it better actually be GOOD at Raytracing.
    Reply
  • 10tacle
    When I read this, I cannot help but think about and reflect back on the SLI days when we could buy one GPU and deal with 35-40fps and then later when more money is saved up by that second to hit the magic 60fps with an LCD which was no faster than 60Hz (or higher if you still had a CRT monitor). And for equal (sometimes better) performance for less money than the highest end single GPU up front. Last August I scored my EVGA FTW3 RTX 3080 Ti from Newegg on their shuffle lottery finally and paid retail of $1399. If SLI were still around and game developer supported (which starts not from hardware but from game developers...thank you for nothing consoles), I'd put that same money up that it would match or beat whatever this GPU's performance winds up being, even at 8K.

    Just a hypothetical $2798 (USD) historic thought to ponder if we could get two 3080 Ti cards and they'd be effective in SLI over whatever this 3090 Ti winds up accomplishing for 50% less.
    Reply
  • mdd1963
    Must..have ....this GPU....for my 60 Hz 1080P monitor...NOW! :)
    Reply
  • Math Geek
    mdd1963 said:
    Must..have ....this GPU....for my 60 Hz 1080P monitor...NOW! :)

    i won't even think about playing a game if i can't get 900 fps or more. once i got past 500, the difference is night and day. who cares if my monitor only shows me 120 of those, my brain is so awesome it infers the other 900 fps or so. 1080p?? and only get 750 fps??? why bother even playing!!! 720p is where it's at so i can get all them yummy extra frames that i so can totally see......:vip:
    Reply