Newegg's median listing price for the RTX 5070 hit $899.99 this week. Back in June it was $659.99. That's a $240 jump — 36% — in about eight weeks, and it isn't even the worst of it. The RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is up 39% over the same stretch, according to pricing Tom's Hardware pulled straight from Newegg's own listings on August 11. Meanwhile, four days earlier, Nvidia was handing out RTX 5090s at $1,999 MSRP from a booth in Grapevine, Texas. Same company, same week, two completely different prices for the same silicon.
Look at that table long enough and the pattern gets weird. The mid-range cards — 5060 Ti 16GB, 5070 — took the biggest percentage hits, while the RTX 5070 Ti didn't move a cent and the 5080 only crept up 3%, per the same Club386 tracking. Nobody at Nvidia or Newegg has explained the 5070 Ti specifically. My read: it's always been the hardest 50-series card to actually find in stock, so there was less headroom left to inflate — retailers were already charging close to what the market would bear.
The QuakeCon contradiction
While all of that was happening, Nvidia ran its GeForce booth at QuakeCon 2026 like a time machine. From August 6 through 9, anyone who showed up in Grapevine, Texas could buy an RTX 5090, 5080, or 5070 Founders Edition at straight MSRP through a system Nvidia called Verified Priority Access IRL — no scalper premium, no waitlist markup. We covered the $1,999 RTX 5090 giveaway when it happened. PC Gamer put it bluntly: it was genuinely cheaper for some people to fly to Texas than to buy the card anywhere else in the country, with the cheapest retail RTX 5090 that same week sitting well north of $4,300.
Nvidia sold RTX 5090 Founders Editions at $1,999 MSRP at its QuakeCon 2026 booth — the same week retail prices elsewhere pushed past $4,300. · Unsplash
What's actually worth buying this week
RTX 5070 Ti — the only card in the stack that hasn't moved since June; if you were already eyeing one, this is the least-bad time to buy
RTX 5080 — up just 3%, close enough to June pricing that waiting probably won't save you much
Skip the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and RTX 5070 right now if you can — they've absorbed the sharpest hikes and are the most likely to soften once GDDR7 supply catches up
Nothing about this month says 'buy now unless you have to.' The GDDR7 shortage isn't resolved, and a four-day MSRP stunt at a gaming convention doesn't change what's sitting on shelves at your local Micro Center. If a card you need is already flat or barely up, grab it. If it's one of the ones that jumped 30%+, the math favors waiting.
Best for: Buyers who don't need a GPU in the next few weeks
Whether this settles down depends entirely on when GDDR7 and general DRAM output catches up with demand — and nobody in the memory industry is promising that soon. We'll keep tracking the Newegg medians as they move. For now, the honest advice is the boring one: buy what you actually need, skip anything you don't, and don't let a booth in Texas convince you MSRP is coming back to a store near you.
