Color Me Not-Shocked: RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 Go out of stock all over the US and UK in 5 minutes

On January 31, 2025By Littum

Have you managed to get hold of the RTX 5090 Founders Edition Card you Sogging? I’m probably not guessing in view of all RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 short theoretical for sale today went out of stock in under five minutes.

I tried to cover the RTX Blackwell launch all over the US and UK today with the rest of the PC Gamer team and there we were at. 06.00, 7 p.m. 14. Snaffle new graphics cards into our online curve as soon as the launch time was upon us.

All to no use. I managed to squeeze into a queue in Best Buy to put a founder edition of the RTX 5090 in my basket for a few minutes before kicking me out with an error message.

And every other card we could find on Newegg and Best Buy was gone the moment we clicked on them. Over on Walmart there was a lonely PNY RTX 5080, but he was also snapped up really quickly.

Even the shockingly overpriced versions, with the RTX 5080s, which cost the same as the RTX 5090 MSRP had gone out of stock. Although I hope it’s just a kind of listing error and someone hasn’t just paid $ 2,000 for something that is only marginally faster than an RTX 4080 Super.

It was the same situation in the UK, where the stock was either gone in a few minutes or the retailer sites fell completely over. In some places, pages had claimed stock, but if you clicked through, they either got up that the stock had gone or there was no way to add a card to your shopping cart anyway.

In my calculation it was all done and dusted by at. 06.05 PT, 14.05 UK. And realistically probably earlier than that – that’s just that when the sites actually caught the fact that the cards had been snapped up.

So is this a success? I guess from the point of view that everyone gets shots from all their warehouse, it will be seen as a victory by both Nvidia and the retailers. How happy anyone who would actually have a new RTX Blackwell GPU is right now, yes, it can be another matter.

Was it great demand or low stock? All noise before release was about either low amounts of chips that went to producers or a low number of cards going to retailers. Neither paints a particularly pink image of digital shelves filled with new cards. Which is a shame considering that Nvidia was reportedly able to choose when it would release this new generation of graphics card, and could certainly have chosen a time when it had managed to put more stock in the channel.

Although there would ever be enough stock in the channel? Is it to Much better to have sold out in ten minutes over five? There will still be a whole lot of disappointed people who are still waiting for reconstructions.

I guess NVIDIA is collecting orders from its big OL ‘Blackwell Server GPUs prioritized more than GeForce GPUs. They were all kinda on the same TSMC 4N node, so maybe there was an element in ensuring that these data center customers were first looked after.

There will still probably be more warehouses that are winding down to retailers soon enough, and we will get new RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 TI -Cards, which will also come our way next month. So keep an eye on our ‘where you can buy …’ pages if you are in the market for one of the new cards.

Just stay away from eBay, eh?