If you have tried to buy an RTX 5090 in the UK recently, you will already know how this goes. At the country's largest component retailer, every one of more than twenty RTX 5090 listings says Notify Me. Another major retailer still has stock, but the cheapest card we could find there on 9 November was £5,999.99, with most sitting between £6,500 and £7,500. This is a card that launched in the UK at under £2,000.
So what is actually going on, is the RTX 5080 going the same way, and what should you do if you were planning a build around either card? Here is where things stand, with the confirmed facts kept separate from the rumours.
What Nvidia has actually said
In mid-October a well-known industry leaker claimed the RTX 5090 had been discontinued, and that Nvidia would send its GB202 chips, the silicon at the heart of the 5090, exclusively to its far more expensive RTX Pro workstation cards. Reports followed of graphics card makers being unable to order new chip kits.
Nvidia has publicly denied that the 5090 is discontinued. A senior Nvidia executive said the card would keep shipping, while acknowledging that supply is constrained. Both things can be true at once: a card that is still technically in production, but in volumes so small that it barely reaches the shelves.
What is not in dispute is the effect. Nvidia's own online store has reportedly stopped listing the 5090, and in the last few weeks the RTX 5080 has reportedly disappeared from it too.
Why it is happening
The most widely reported cause is memory. The RTX 5090 carries 32GB of GDDR7, and the companies that make graphics memory are selling everything they can produce to AI data centres, at far better margins. It is the same squeeze that has pushed RAM and SSD prices up all year, which we covered in our RAM and SSD price crisis update.
There is also a simpler commercial logic. The chip inside a 5090 can be sold as a professional RTX Pro card for several times the money. When supply is tight, it is not hard to work out where a manufacturer would rather send it. Nvidia has not said this is what is happening, so treat it as a reasonable explanation rather than a confirmed one.
Is the RTX 5080 next?
Possibly, but it is not there yet in the UK. On 9 November, the same large retailer that has no 5090s had more than half of its RTX 5080 listings in stock, starting at £1,499.99. That is still roughly half as much again as the card's UK launch price of under £1,000, and around fifteen models were already showing as out of stock.
The US is a few weeks further along. There, RTX 5080 prices have roughly doubled since launch to around $2,000, and stock at the major retailers has thinned sharply. UK pricing has tended to follow US trends with a lag, so we would not bet on the 5080 getting cheaper before Christmas.
What about the rumoured 24GB RTX 5080?
You may have read that a 24GB RTX 5080, sometimes called the 5080 Super, is on its way to replace both the current 5080 and the 5090. Nvidia has not announced it. Reports from early November flatly contradict each other: some say it was cancelled before production started, others that it has been delayed, possibly beyond January.
We would not plan a purchase around a card that may not exist. Even if it does arrive, it will be launching into exactly the same memory shortage, with even more memory on board.
What we would do now
The right move depends entirely on what the card is for.
- If you game. At £6,000 or more, a 5090 is impossible to justify for gaming. An RTX 5080 or 5070 Ti will run almost everything superbly at 1440p and very well at 4K, and we looked at how much the rest of the system matters at that resolution in our 4K bottleneck guide. If a 5080 is the right card for you and you were going to buy in the next few weeks anyway, we do not see much to be gained by waiting.
- If you genuinely need 32GB of video memory. Large local AI models, 8K video timelines and very heavy 3D scenes are where the 5090 earns its place, and where a 16GB card is a real compromise rather than a slightly slower one. The honest options here are to pay today's price with your eyes open, look at professional cards, which do come with more memory but are no cheap escape route, or wait. Our local AI and LLM guide covers how much memory different models actually need, which is worth checking before you spend anything.
- If you were about to buy a 5090 from a marketplace seller. Be careful. A £7,000 card from an unfamiliar third-party seller, with no clear UK warranty and no easy route for returns, is a much bigger risk than the price alone suggests. If something goes wrong, you want a business on the other end of the phone, not a seller account that has quietly disappeared.
Where we stand
We have moved every RTX 5090 build on our site to enquiry only. Prices are moving daily, and we are not prepared to show you a figure we cannot actually buy the card for. If you want a 5090 system, get in touch and we will quote you against what is genuinely obtainable that week.
For now we are still building around the RTX 5080. If that changes, we will update the site rather than leave a price up that we cannot honour.
Build it with us
Have a play with our PC configurator, or get in touch and tell us what the machine is for. Matt handles our graphics card sourcing and will tell you honestly what is obtainable this week, what it costs, and whether a different card would do the job just as well. Every system is hand-built to order in our Stevenage workshop, stress-tested before it ships, and backed by our 5-year warranty.
