We have our first taste at aftermarket graphics card pricing, in the United States, for the GeForce RTX 3090, a card that's certain to be a top contender for best graphics card on the high end. Zotac's GeForce RTX 3090 Trinity has a listing on B&H photo, an online retailer, for $1,499.99. For reference, the Founders Edition GeForce RTX 3090 directly from Nvidia is the exact same price. This is nice to see as not everyone will want the FE model, but I am sure you'll want the same "cheap" RTX 3090 pricing for the base model aftermarket cards.
Though this pricing is not exactly surprising, beginning with Pascal and Turing, Nvidia took a different approach with its own "home-brewed" graphics cards. The company stopped making reference models altogether and replaced them with more customized models called the Founders Edition. Nvidia launched these cards with higher clock speeds versus reference, and a heftier price tag competitive to that of higher trim aftermarket cards. However, with Ampere, we have yet to see an aftermarket card below founders edition pricing, which was usually the case with previous generations.
To our knowledge, the Trinity serves as Zotac's mid-range and entry-level lineup for the RTX 3090, RTX 3080, and RTX 3070. All they have for now is the AMP Extreme, the Trinity, and Twin Edge cards. The Twin Edge looks to simply be a two-fan version of the Trinity. So, I'd assume pricing for both Twin Edge and Trinity will be equal.
Zotac says its Trinity models for the RTX 3000 series will arrive around the second half of September. This looks to be confirmation that the Founders Edition cards will launch alongside AIB models, which is great to see!
