As spotted by VideoCardz, Nvidia have been bumping up the prices of their latest reference cards: the GeForce RTX 30 Founders Edition series. Here in the UK it’s only the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition that’s seen a hike, from £529 up to £549, but over in the lands of the Euro these graphics cards will set buyers back up to €100 more than before. That’s for the RTX 3090 FE, which now sits at a widowmaking €1,649, while the rest of the range has gained between €20 and €60 in wallet weight.
There’s a bit of a worry that we’ll see more of these price changes in the UK. While stock is vanishingly rare even by modern GPU standards, the Founders Edition models have presented some of the best opportunities to actually buy a new graphics card at retail value, either direct from Nvidia or from partnered retailers like Scan. Knowing both that, and the fact that these are some of the best graphics cards on the market, any further rise in the barrier to entry is going to disappoint.
That said, when it comes to price gouging, the green team clearly has a lot to learn – what’s another £20 when other RTX 3070 Ti models are going on Amazon for £1,200 or more? Come on, Nvidia, you’re not even artificially inflating these prices by double. Amateur hour, honestly. I guess there’s also the possibility of these Founders Edition rises being used to justify other RTX 30 series models getting even more expensive, but then nobody should be dropping several times the RRP on a graphics card to begin with. Even if it is a really, really tasty one.
Indeed, even if the whole lot of Founders Edition cards got the same hikes in the UK as they have in the EU, they’d still likely remain among the best-value GPU options available. Sometimes available, anyway.
