Nvidia RTX 50 series faces sharp price increases amid market volatility

The graphics card market is experiencing significant volatility, characterized by sharp price increases for Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50 series and a surge in modified hardware in China.

In the United States, median prices for Blackwell-based GPUs have risen sharply. The RTX 5060 Ti 16GB has seen a 39% increase, while the RTX 5070 has climbed 36% compared to June 2026 data. These hikes place current market prices significantly above original MSRPs. Similar trends are observed in South Korea, with price increases ranging from 20% to 30%. In Japan, distributors report difficulties restocking several RTX 50 series models.

Simultaneously, a secondary market for modified NVIDIA RTX 4080 cards has emerged in China. These units have been upgraded from 16GB to 32GB of GDDR6X VRAM to better support local AI inference and large language models. While these modifications offer higher memory capacity, they lack official manufacturer warranties and require modified drivers to function, as standard Nvidia software does not recognize the altered configuration.

In hardware performance testing, recent data suggests that while PCIe 5.0 SSDs offer superior theoretical speeds, they provide negligible advantages over PCIe 4.0 models in actual gaming performance.