We are a few days away from the official release of the RTX 4080 16GB. The price of this card is already known, at least for the Founders Edition: €1469 in Europe and $1199 in the USA. A hefty price when you consider that the RTX 4090 had already exploded the ceilings. Now it’s the turn of the custom versions to reveal their prices and it’s fair to say that the bill won’t get any lower. Indeed, we now know that a custom version can be charged up to 2130 euros in Europe (including taxes) and up to 1630 $ in the USA. Prices that exceed the RTX 4090 FE…
In North America, the bill is also high on custom cards.
Coming back to Europe, the prices of the custom models (and we often talk about the RGB level of the custom) really sting. Here are a few examples: The GIGABYTE RTX 4080 EAGLE OC, an honest reference but not really enthusiastic with its design and features, is priced at 1839 euros. If we ask for a little more refinement, we find ourselves at ASUS with its TUF Gaming model offered at the modest sum of 1969 euros. If you like to shine, then let’s go to the 4080 ROG Strix OC which is priced at 2129 euros!
RTX 4080 PRICE: Either the brands have lost their minds, or Nvidia wants to kill them
This is a situation that leads to several reflections. During our various exchanges with engineers in charge of card design for several major brands, all of them admitted that it was increasingly difficult to differentiate themselves. Nvidia (but AMD is also following the same logic) imposes the following of specifications making it impossible to develop a card that explodes everything technically. If we combine this with the time delay that the greens allow between the arrival of the chips and the launch of the cards: in the end, all the cards look the same technically. The only room for freedom is in the design (and the amount of RGB LEDs). This is already an observation that EVGA made when it broke with Nvidia. In these conditions, how to explain such a big difference between the Founders Edition model, whose design is objectively of great quality, and the Customs models, which are more and more limited to aesthetics?
Here is a hypothesis: Either the brands are abusing and continue to make abusive margins… Or Nvidia’s objective is to progressively free itself from all its partners and to distribute finished products by disgusting the partner brands. In this case, others will quickly follow EVGA.
