How much will the RTX 5090 cost? This $50K server gives clues
The buzz around the web is that Nvidia’s next-gen graphics cards will be coming sometime in early 2025. We don’t know how much they’ll cost, but “a whole helluva lot” seems like a safe bet. And apparently that’ll be true even if you’re buying them in a massive industrial server, which is the first place where we’ve seen a price attached.
More specifically, we’ve seen it in Europe, courtesy of German site HardwareLuxx (via VideoCardz.com). After announcing new AI-focused servers packed to the gills with RTX 5090 graphics cards, system integrator Comino invited prospective buyers to pre-order. HardwareLuxx asked for prices, and Comino just… gave it to them. How nice. What isn’t nice is the price, even if you break it down into individual components.
Alright, enough stalling. The price for a server running a bank of eight RTX 5090 cards is estimated at 50,000 euro (approximately $52,700 USD). A six-card version of the server will be 40,000 euro. That works out to $6,500 or so per card for the “best” deal.
Before we go any further, you should consider a few things. One, Nvidia hasn’t officially confirmed anything about the RTX 5000 series, so all of this is speculative at best (and very weird for an apparent Nvidia partner to divulge). Second, business-to-business prices for servers aren’t going to be any kind of indication of final retail prices for cards being sold directly to consumers.
The prices we’re looking at are for hugely complex infrastructure hardware including the full machine (with “big iron” processors like AMD’s Threadripper Pro series) and just as important, the service and support that goes with them.
If you can believe it, the quoted price for this setup is actually really good, at least compared to what little public info is available on comparable systems. Comino doesn’t list prices for most of its current machines, but occasionally specialist media gets its hands on one of them just for kicks.
Here’s a WePC review of a Grando server with four RTX 3090 cards with an approximate price given as $28,000. At the time it was written just over a year ago, an RTX 3090 card was going for a little over $1,000 at retail. For a four-card machine, $7,000 per card, that’s a scale of seven to one.
Let’s gather another data point just for kicks. Here’s a Comino server with four RTX 4090 cards (among lots of other high-end components!) that you can buy for just $34,569 right now. The RTX 4090 is sold out pretty much everywhere at the moment, but let’s assume you can find a listing and someone willing to sell you one — you’ll pay about $1,800. Using the same total price to single card math, you get a ratio of 4.8 to one. A much better deal, on paper.
Let’s average out those two data points and assume a six to one ratio. So the estimated price of the server, divided by the number of cards, divided by six, gives us an approximate retail price. For the 8-card Grando server it would be 1,040 euro or $1,100. For the six-card server that figure would be 1,100 euro, $1,160 US.
There’s about a zero percent chance that a new RTX 5090 will cost anything in the ballpark of $1,000 at retail, whenever it arrives. Frankly I wouldn’t be surprised to see it go for $2,500 or more. See what I mean about these numbers being meaningless for consumers?
Either Comino is getting an amazing deal on these new servers, or it’s giving a pretty huge under-estimation of their final price… or there’s another factor that I’m missing in all this hardware stuff. Which seems much more likely, to be frank. If Comino charges separately for its custom water-cooled installation, for example, the price would almost double, and even out my napkin math.