Best Buy creates the GPU pricing meme nobody asked for, so here's the sadly inevitable Nvidia RTX 5090 for $5090

This is definitely not a trend we want to see develop: graphics cards with pricing to match their model numbers. But it's happened, all the same. The MSI Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 32G LIGHTNING Z Liquid Cooled Graphics Card is up on Best Buy for $5090.

Okay, it's actually $5090.99. Apparently, the draw of the extra $0.99 is so strong it partially trumped what must have been an intentional gag by whoever priced this thing up.

The slight caveat here is that, as I write, the card is sold out. So, it's possible that the price is a light hearted, if possibly tone deaf, placeholder. That said, it's not the most expensive RTX 5090 on the Best Buy.

The Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 WINDFORCE 32G is up for $5,498.75. And that's in stock and available to buy. So, there's no doubting the real price of the MSI card could genuinely be as high as $5090.

As for the precedent this sets for other cards, it obviously ain't great. Next-gen RTX $6090, sorry 6090, anyone? How about an AMD Radeon RX 9070 for $9070? A possible next-gen AMD 10,000 Series would be, er, fun, too.

Of course, even if intentional (likely) and a real price (quite possibly), what this mainly does is just underline the fact that the brief period where GPU prices normalised, at least relative to official MSRPs, is now firmly behind us.

You can check out our current best graphics card deals here. We're not actually listing any RTX 5090s right now on account of the painful pricing. But even so, the cheapest RTX 5080 is over $1,300. And a 5060 Ti 16 GB starts at $520. Ouch.

Long story short, pretty much nothing is available at MSRP. And as things stand, what with the AI industry planning to spend even more on hardware this year, it's hard to see how that gets better, not worse, any time soon. Bleh.