If you've been trying to find a GeForce RTX 5090 card for anything approaching MSRP since the cards first went on sale at the end of January, perhaps this will catch your eye. Newegg is selling Gigabyte RTX 5090 plus Intel Z890 motherboard combos starting at $3139. I know that sounds like a lot (because it is!), but the going rate for RTX 5090 cards over the past few months has been $4,000 and up. So the RTX 5090 price here is "only" $2,919 now.
This follows Newegg's past behavior of offering bundles of highly sought after items with products that few people want. We saw that with the best graphics cards during the pandemic and mining induced shortages, we've seen it with CPUs like the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and now Newegg apparently wants to clear some Intel Z890 inventory. Why not an AMD X870 motherboard bundle? I can imagine some bean counter calling out, "Wonder Twin powers... deactivate!"
It's funny / sad that you can buy the combo but not the individual Gigabyte RTX 5090 GPU because that's "out of stock" — with a helpful "Combo available" notification. It makes you wonder if this bundle stems from Newegg or Gigabyte, though perhaps that doesn't matter as the net result is the same. Maybe Gigabyte should bundle one of its exploding PSUs with the card for good measure?
What's particularly painful here is that these are Intel Z890 boards. That means they're designed for Intel Arrow Lake CPUs, like the Core Ultra 9 285K. Gaming performance has been particularly bad on Arrow Lake, for a variety of reasons. The latest BIOS and firmware updates have helped a bit (including a new Intel 200S Boost feature that bumps memory and fabric speeds and yields a few percent performance increase), but socket LGA1851 will apparently be a dead end, and there won't be any new CPUs for the platform.
So it's basically a motherboard that would be fine for a productivity / office build, but a board that will also limit gaming performance. And it's paired with the fastest graphics card currently available — and very possibly the fastest consumer GPU that we'll have until the next generation parts arrive in 2027. Awesome.
If you do happen to buy one of the RTX 5090 + Z890 motherboard bundles, don't just sell the motherboard on eBay or a similar place. You'll need to return both if you change your mind. RMA and warranty coverage shouldn't be a problem, though, as you'd be dealing with Gigabyte for that. The going rate for RTX 5090 cards on eBay over the past 30 days has averaged $4,039.50, with 207 units sold, and at least this comes from a mostly reputable source — questionable bundling practices notwithstanding.
