Nvidia RTX 4080 GPU early prices pop up – and there’s good and bad news

Nvidia’s RTX 4080 has popped up at retailers with one graphics card showing at the MSRP in the US as we near the official on-sale date – but the news isn’t so good in the UK sadly (or elsewhere in Europe).

So, the official MSRP in the US is $1,199 for the GeForce RTX 4080 (16GB version – which is the only variant now, of course, since the 12GB spin was canceled), and we’ve also seen that it will retail in the UK at an MSRP of £1,269 (we’ll come back to that).

This is the price Nvidia will sell for, but third-party custom versions of the RTX 4080 will command more of a premium in some cases, but not in every instance, and we’ve seen that illustrated with a PNY graphics card that has the official MSRP pinned to it.

As Tom’s Hardware highlights, this is the PNY Gaming Verto RTX 4080 which is priced at bang-on $1,199 and might be up for pre-order before long, bearing in mind the 4080 isn’t officially on sale until November 16, just over a fortnight away yet.

There’s also the faster overclocked (OC) edition of this graphics card listed on Newegg, but it isn’t yet priced – obviously with the boost clock made to run a bit faster, offering a little better performance, it’ll be somewhat more costly.

VideoCardz further spotted that Laptops Direct in the UK has Palit’s RTX 4080 OmniBlack at £1,450 actually on pre-order (with delivery time listed as “from three weeks”), and more expensive models from Palit reaching up to £1,530 (that’s the GameRock OC at the top-end).

There are RTX 4080 models listed elsewhere (in the US and UK) but none yet have pricing attached. Doubtless that’ll change soon as the launch nears.

Analysis: The good, the bad, and the Ampere alternative

From what we can see so far, there’s obviously good and bad here. It’s good to see that in the US, a third-party model of the RTX 4080 is sticking to the MSRP – assuming the price tag doesn’t shift from that point, of course.

The UK appears to be a different story thus far, but Laptops Direct is not where most people go for their graphics card needs (as you might guess, that retailer is pretty popular for, er, laptops though). The likes of Scan or Overclockers UK (OCUK) for example still don’t have prices attached to the RTX 4080 models that can be spotted on their respective sites (actually, Scan doesn’t even have standalone cards listed yet, just prebuilt systems with the RTX 4080, unpriced).

Those prices we can see at Laptops Direct are nonetheless an ominous sign, and the fact that the MSRP itself is more than the US is disappointing too (even if highly predictable given recent currency movements and so forth). What we can see at Scan is the price of the RTX 4090 being between £1,950 and £2,000, and at OCUK it’s a similar story of £1,980 to £2,030, which doesn’t bode well for the RTX 4080 coming in at its MSRP of £1,269 in that country.

We could well be looking at £1,500, then, or maybe even creeping up from there with beefier RTX 4080 models, particularly if stock is thinner on the ground initially. And how will that compare with Ampere graphics cards? Well, you can pick up an RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition for £1,149 (at Scan) right now – and it’s unclear how much better the RTX 4080 16GB will be than the 3090 Ti (outside of the bigger boosts for DLSS 3 games, that is, which are of course very much a niche proposition still).

This kind of pricing makes the beefier RTX 3000 models look tempting, for sure, and some might argue perhaps that’s the idea with the initial RTX 4000 launches (as we keep hearing, Nvidia and partners do have a lot of Ampere stock to clear, still).

Another argument might be if you’re going to fork out that much for an RTX 4080, why not just go the whole hog and get the 4090 anyway (though melting power adapters might concern you at this point with the Lovelace flagship).

We can’t get carried away with early hints of pricing, of course, and there’s still that glimmer of hope for decent pricing in the US – providing that PNY card doesn’t turn out to have a placeholder price tag – even if that’s not the case in the UK (and elsewhere in Europe for that matter, where Lovelace cards can be even more expensive).

Whether or not the RTX 4000 range ends up at MSRP, mind, these recommended prices are still rather ridiculous, certainly for the RTX 4080 when you compare it to the RTX 3080 which came with an MSRP of $699 (or £649), even if you couldn’t actually buy it for anything like that.