You may want to start saving up now if you are looking to upgrade your gaming PC with a new GPU from the upcoming NVIDIA RTX 50-series video cards. Two Acer Predator Orion gaming PCs featuring the NVIDIA RTX 5080 and 5090 graphics cards with lofty price tags were previously spotted by Videocardz after they were erroneously posted by a German retailer. The listings have since been removed.
The retailer, Otto.de, featured two high-end Acer Predator Orion line gaming PCs that paired NVIDIA's Blackwell GPUs with the recently released Intel Arrow Lake CPUs. The most expensive of the pair packed a Core Ultra 9 285K, 128 GB of DDR5 RAM, a 2 TB SSD, and the NVIDIA RTX 5090 32 GB for €5999. Our sister site, Tom's Hardware, went so far as to figure out taxes and conversion for this rig, including VAT, estimating a $7539 price tag.
The second Orion 7000 listing matches up the Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF with a more modest 32 GB of DDR5, a 1 TB SSD, and the NVIDIA RTX 5080 16 GB for €3499. Tom's Hardware did the math here, also including VAT, putting an estimated price tag of $4399 on this "mid-range" system.
Increased power comes at an increased price
After their premature reveal, the Orion 7000 PCs were quickly delisted from Otto.de. It's difficult to know whether the prices listed at the time of the leak are what we can expect for these prebuilt gaming PCs or if they are simply placeholders.
NVIDIA has yet to give the Blackwell their time in the spotlight with a proper announcement. At this point, we're all still basically gleaning what little information from leaks we can until NVIDIA CEO Jason Huang takes the stage during CES 2025 to formally reveal the cards. What we can assume here, however, is that there is likely to be a hefty price difference between the 5080 and 5090 at launch. We are also likely to see the prices of the new cards clock in a couple of hundred bucks higher than their 40-series equivalents.
Previous leaks of 5080 and 5090 specs suggested the cards would have significant upticks in CUDA cores and VRAM over 40-series cards but with a sizable increase in power draw. If you're planning to upgrade your GPU, you may also consider upgrading your power supply to keep up. Waiting for the latest in graphics cards may have come with increased costs beyond just the still-veiled price of the unit itself.
That also doesn't take into consideration the overall heft of the cards themselves, which are likely to be even chunkier than the 40-series we have now. If you're lucky enough not to need a brand-new case to fit the 50-series cards, you will probably need to consider investing in a sag bracket to keep the card level, at the very least.
Of course, any speculation about the costs and value of Blackwell cards should also be peppered with concern for what scalpers could do to the early days of resell markets. When even the mid-range GPUs are rumored to cost $1000 and up, it certainly reopens the still-fresh wounds of those of us who were trying to secure 30-series cards during pandemic-era pricing and launch shortages.
Recent game releases are making my 3070 TI feel more obsolete by the day (I'm looking at you, Indiana Jones, and the Great Circle), but it's hard to know just how much the market can bear for increased GPU prices. AMD has effectively dropped out of the high-end gaming GPU market. Intel's Battlemage GPUs are still yet to show any promise in the space, and it feels a lot like NVIDIA has both its hands in my wallet this generation.
