We are just a few days away from Nvidia officially announcing the RTX 50 series. Many leakers have already shared information about the specifications of Nvidia’s upcoming best graphics cards, but pricing remained a mystery – until now. Vex, a YouTuber, just shared a claim about the price of Nvidia’s RTX 5080, and it looks like we could have a repeat of the previous generation on our hands, and then some.

Before we go into detail, here’s the obligatory disclaimer: We have no way of verifying the credibility of this leak. Vex was reportedly contacted by someone who works for an Australian retailer and that person provided a screenshot listing many Asus RTX 5080 graphics cards along with some basic specs and pricing. It could be true, but it could also be fake – we just don’t know at the moment. One thing is for sure: if this is true, it’s not good news for gamers.

The RTX 5080 is listed with 16GB of memory in the screenshot, which is consistent with previous leaks, although it’s unclear whether it will use faster VRAM modules as some have said. The full listing is for the Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5080 16 GB OC, which is an overclocked card.

Then there are the prices. The first line lists the purchase price – how much this Australian retailer had to pay to buy the card from Asus. The second line is the actual list price, which is how much you would pay to buy one of these GPUs. The purchase price is 2,544 Australian dollars, the list price is a whopping 2,799 Australian dollars.

Luckily, exchange rates make prices sound a lot scarier than they actually are. Conversion from Australian dollars to US dollars shows that the purchase price is approximately $1,581 and the selling price is approximately $1,740 at the time of writing. It is also important to note that these prices include sales tax, which would not be included in the US

No matter how you spin it, $1,740 for an RTX 5080 sounds like a lot. Some rumors suggest that the 5080’s performance will be around the same level as the 4090, but it could fall short of those expectations, which would make the price even harder to accept.

We’ve already seen signs that the RTX 5080 may be an expensive proposition. Take this leaked listing of the Acer Predator Orion for example – the version with the RTX 5080 cost around $3,640. However, not all hope is lost.

Even if we assume that all of that is true and that this unnamed Australian retailer will soon be selling the RTX 5080 for the equivalent of $1,740, we have to take into account the fact that it’s an Asus-made card, at that an overclocked one. Nvidia’s recommended list price (MSRP) is likely to be at a more conservative level; His board partners tend to jack up prices by an extra few hundred dollars. The Founders Edition and non-OC versions are certainly cheaper.

Nvidia’s RTX 4080 was launched with a price tag of $1,200, and many thought that was too much. The Super variant fixed this problem and reduced the price to $1,000. Could Nvidia then turn around and raise the price of the RTX 5080 back to $1,200-$1,500? I hope not. We’ll find out more on January 6th when Nvidia officially announces the graphics card.