It’s being reported that NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 cards have already sold out in the European market, and that all the units were bought out by scalper bots. Worse, the European retailer that is selling the cards had broken the sale embargo imposed by the GPU brand.
The retailer that’s currently under the spotlight is a German outlet called Proshop. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because the chain previously appeared in an earlier report regarding the launch window for the AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series. The German tech portal, PC Games Hardware, said that it was informed by its community that some users had been openly boasting about how they had managed to get their hands on some RTX 50 FE cards well before their 29 January launch date.
We now have confirmation that the entire European supply of RTX 50 FE cards was scalped by bots before the official launch. @PCGH_Redaktion tracked down the creator of the bot and his discord server. IMHO, all orders need to be canceled and @NVIDIAGeForce should look for a new…
— High Yield (@highyieldYT) January 31, 2025
Proshop is the exclusive retailer for all of NVIDIA’s Founders Edition cards, by the way, and supposedly, all the RTX 50 Series cards were purchase in advanced by a bot called “NVIDIA KSB Test v1.1.” This bot was reportedly distributed via German-speaking Discord channels, along with instructions on how to configure said bot so that consumers could secure their cards early.
When news of the scalping bots swallowing up all order of the RTX 50 Series came to light and the media began probing, Proshop told them to contact NVIDIA directly. Basically, its version of saying “screw off” and not wanting to answer for their breaking of the embargo.
I have to correct myself: GeForce RTX 5090 is indeed available at the German/Austrian market.
And in case anyone thinks this is a joke:https://t.co/OnCLch51vHhttps://t.co/wXw3xpYMMh pic.twitter.com/VbjzKnhWY7
— 3DCenter.org (@3DCenter_org) January 30, 2025
And it’s not just scalper bots that are the problem. Some retailers in Europe have also been observed to be selling their day-one cards at prices well above NVIDIA’s MSRPs. For example, one retailer in Germany (yet again) was seen listing two of MSI’s custom RTX 5090 cards at €4,949 and €4,999 each. That’s more than US$5,000 (~RM22,274), and way more than the card’s SRP of US$1,999 (~RM8,905).
At the time of writing, NVIDIA has yet to respond to the European issue but hopefully, the company will come up with a solution to the problem.
(Source: PC Game Hardware, Videocardz)
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