A separate card more expensive than an entire PC? The GPU market has definitely lost its logic.

At the beginning of this year, we found ourselves at a point that is rewriting the history of graphics card marketing. The gaming community is watching with embarrassment as market rules are bent to unrecognizable proportions and economic logic is replaced by pure madness. The latest sales channel analyses only confirm the reality that has been whispered about since December – the current price of the GeForce RTX 5090 on store shelves has come dangerously close to the amount you can buy a whole top-of-the-line gaming rig for today (in some cases even sets containing an RTX 5090). In many cases, it even exceeds it without any problems.

A technological gem for the price of a used car

If you want to buy Nvidia’s flagship product separately today, be prepared to pay a hefty price. The market situation is so dire that buying separate graphics components no longer makes sense. The global hunger for performance for local artificial intelligence (AI) systems has caused the price of the GeForce RTX 5090 in regular e-shops to approach the $4,300 mark. Some premium editions with integrated water cooling exceed this milestone by hundreds of dollars.

This is a hard blow for gamers and creators—one card now costs as much as a complete pre-built computer, which, paradoxically, contains an identical chip, powerful processor, motherboard, and fast storage. This situation puts DIY PC builders in an unsolvable predicament, where building your own high-end rig from individual components is perceived as an economically unjustifiable luxury.

Why are individual cards more expensive than ready-made assemblies?

This situation has deep roots in the priorities of manufacturers, which in 2026 definitively shifted away from the needs of the average gamer. The Blackwell architecture on which this generation is built has brought such a leap in the efficiency of AI model training that companies are buying up retail stocks by the pallet load. While large system integrators and manufacturers of ready-made assemblies have contracted supplies directly from Nvidia for fixed amounts, for the end customer in retail, the current price of the GeForce RTX 5090 is the result of a speculative battle for the last available units.

In addition, the technological complexity of the device itself should not be overlooked. The implementation of 32 GB of new GDDR7 memory with a 512-bit bus accounts for a significant portion of the production value. If we add to this the power supply cascades designed for a TDP exceeding 500 W, we arrive at manufacturing costs that are unprecedented. Many reviewers are therefore rightly asking whether we are witnessing the end of the era of “home DIY.” If the graphics card in the finished assembly is subsidized by a lower price as part of a bulk purchase package, the high price of the GeForce RTX 5090 is currently the biggest obstacle to the development of the custom assembly segment.

Parameter	GeForce RTX 5090 values
Architecture	Blackwell (GB202 chip)
CUDA cores	21,760
Video memory (VRAM)	32 GB GDDR7
Memory bus	512-bit
Memory bandwidth	1,792 GB/s
Base clock	~ 2,017 MHz
Boost clock	~ 2,407 MHz (OC models up to 2,600 MHz)
Power consumption (TDP)	575 W (some models up to 600 W)
Interface	PCIe 5.0 x16
Power	1x 16-pin (12V-2×6)

The future of high-end and the search for a solution

The current situation does not bode well for the community that has been building its own machines. If the price of the GeForce RTX 5090 remains at these levels in the long term, it could have a fatal impact on the entire gaming industry. Developers could stop optimizing games for the absolute high-end, as the base of owners of such hardware will be too narrow to make it worthwhile to invest in. This would mean visual stagnation of titles for many years to come.

At the moment, the reality is more than grim, and if you crave uncompromising performance and smooth 8K gaming, buying a ready-made computer from a reputable manufacturer is, paradoxically, the only sensible way to circumvent this distorted system. The extreme price of the GeForce RTX 5090 reminds us of technological progress, but at the same time takes away the freedom that we, as PC builders, have loved for years.