With memory prices staying high, graphics cards have unsurprisingly kept rising in price as well, especially high-end models. Since its launch, the RTX 5090 has never dropped back to its MSRP, and has even been seen at two to three times the original price. But the dramatic price hike isn’t even the strangest part—recently, a curious sight has emerged in the US market where a full prebuilt PC equipped with an RTX 5090 actually costs less than buying a single RTX 5090 graphics card on its own. It just goes to show how chaotic the current market pricing really is.
Image source: VideoCardz
Market madness: A full RTX 5090 PC costs less than the graphics card alone!
According to VideoCardz’s reportRecently, they checked the prices for RTX 5090 computers and standalone graphics cards. After actually comparing prices, they found that the full system was surprisingly cheaper. They went to HP’s official website and selected an OMEN MAX 45L model, which comes with an RTX 5090 discrete GPU. Then they went to PCPartPicker to confirm the standalone RTX 5090 pricing from major retailers.
First, looking at the full system: the HP OMEN MAX 45L specs include an AMD Ryzen 7 9700X processor, 32GB DDR5-6000 memory, 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD, plus motherboard, power supply, cooling, case, and a Windows 11 OS. VideoCardz says they only changed two items—the graphics card and the power supply—swapping the GPU to an RTX 5090 32GB and upgrading the PSU to a level capable of running that card, while everything else stays at the original default configuration. The price is $4,709.99:
Image source: VideoCardz
Looking at the graphics card side, PCPartPicker shows some RTX 5090 listings just over $4,000, but after clicking through each one, none of them could actually be ordered or shipped normally. So after filtering out those phantom listings, the actual lowest price for a card you can really buy is the ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 OC, listed at $4,829.99 on the official site—$120 more than the HP OMEN MAX 45L.
Image source: VideoCardz
In fact, an RTX 5090 prebuilt can even be cheaper. I went to HP’s US website and reconfigured another OMEN 45L, choosing a Core Ultra 7 265K, Kingston FURY 16GB DDR5-6000, 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD, and RTX 5090, and the price came to just $4,629.99, about $80 less than the AMD OMEN MAX 45L that VideoCardz found:
As for why brand-name pre-built systems can actually be cheaper, there is currently no clear answer. A reasonable speculation is that it may be related to differences in the contract prices brand manufacturers get when purchasing graphics cards, GPUs, and other components. Additionally, since pricing for pre-built systems and retail graphics cards are not adjusted in sync, when retail RTX 5090 prices spike quickly, there can be a temporary price inversion where a full pre-built system costs less than a single graphics card.
Does Taiwan have this kind of deal? I looked it up online, and unfortunately, no. There are still some RTX 5090 pre-built PCs in stock at certain retailers (very few), but standalone cards are gone—many online shopping sites show them as out of stock.
Source: KOCPC Chinese