The news about the future availability of NVIDIA’s RTX 50s is decidedly not good. There are new reports of a shortage of cards at launch, with a launch without any cards at all. Well, yes, one here and there and then nothing. Unfortunately, this situation is likely to last for some time – in some cases, up to three months!
RTX 50: three months of stock instability?
As we told you here, the availability of the cards is likely to be put to the test. To put it simply, according to VideoCardz, the Chameleon only published the final bios for its cards at a very late stage, which had an impact on the preparation of stocks by its partners, who were only able to get down to work from the end of 2024. Inevitably, these delays will be felt at the time of marketing, particularly for the RTX 5090, where problems are rumoured for the next three months. Some are even describing the card’s launch as the worst in terms of availability.
Benchlife also comes with bad news, indicating that these disruptions will be felt by other products in the Blackwell range. There’s talk of the 5070 Ti hitting the market in mid-February, compared with March for the RTX 5070.
Of course, we’ll have to watch out for the crooks who might take advantage of this shortage to gorge themselves… We know who they are. You only have to look at the prices currently being charged for the Ryzen 7 9800X3D to see that some are charging more than comfortable margins. Similarly, we can also expect anti-scalping measures with restrictions on the number of cards purchased per person: 1 per household, for example.
However, others are going a little too far, such as Taiwanese retailer AutoBuy. AutoBuy is putting RTX 5080 buyers on a waiting list: if they want to get to the top of the list, they have to buy a motherboard, CPU, SSD, RAM, Windows licence or power supply..
