MSI’s limited-edition RTX 5090 Lightning Z launched to great acclaim at CES 2026, with the ultra-powerful GPU breaking overclocking records even before it launched. The company only made 1,300 units of this high-performance graphics card, meaning it will only have limited availability. Its earth-shattering capabilities are only matched by its wallet-shattering $5,090 asking price — but scalpers are seemingly ready and willing to shell out that amount in the hopes of getting an even bigger payday when stock has run out.
We’ve seen one eBay listing the GPU at nearly GBP 20,000 — that’s nearly US$27,000 at current exchange rates. We’re unsure if this is a legitimate offer, though, as the seller’s profile mostly showed cheaper replacement Ikea parts and a few electronics, mostly priced under US$100. When we checked sold listings for sealed, brand new MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z GPUs, the price ranged from around $6,700 to a little over $8,800. This is a bit more reasonable, but still at least $1,500 over MSI’s price and more than three times the $2,000 MSRP Nvidia set for the RTX 5090 Founders Edition. As it stands, eBay listings for the card range from $6,000 all the way up to nearly $15,000.
Nevertheless, gamers and enthusiasts bent on breaking records will likely pull the trigger on this purchase just for the extra fps that it delivers. According to our review of the MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z, the GPU performs about 12% faster out of the box than a stock RTX 5090 FE. The gap widened to about 18% when the GPU was manually overclocked, likening its performance to that of a theoretical RTX 5090 Ti.
Article continues belowThose who do not want to do manual tuning but still desire to maximize the Lightning Z’s performance can switch to the Extreme vBIOS, allowing it to draw up to 1000 watts — some 200 watts over the stock OC vBIOS. Aside from that, MSI also released a 2,500-watt XOC BIOS exclusively to overclockers to get every bit of GPU performance from the expensive GPU. One overclocker tried to achieve a world record using this BIOS, but they apparently had an earlier version of it, resulting in a crack from the thermal shock delivered by the massive amounts of power. Thankfully, they still have four more samples of this extreme GPU, allowing them to continue working on it and achieve higher benchmark results in the future.
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