In a true sign of the times, one benevolent retailer in India is kindly granting three lucky customers the opportunity to buy a graphics card at MSRP. Videocardz spotted advertising for the competition, which seems to be in ties with cardbuilder Colorful. It offers entrants the chance to win a shot at buying a Colorful RTX 5080 at the set retail price for the Nvidia card.
Sounds like a solid trade off for all the customer data the retailer is likely to collect on the entry forms.
To not be entirely pessimistic, the Colorful card on offer is actually quite a bit fancier than the standard Nvidia 5080 offering. The iGame GeForce RX 5080 Ultra on offer comes in a clean and bright white casing with bight pink graffiti highlights, as well as the turbo button the brand has become known for. One click puts the card into factory overlocked mode, though I will say we've had our own issues with that button on the RTX 5070 Ti card of its we're testing at the moment.
Given how huge the overhead is on the RTX 5080, however, the potential for overclocking boons is astounding. That little button may likely be a very welcome addition that gives an easy way to get a bit more out of these units. All of these features combined set the MSRP on these cards is about $300 higher than your standard Nvidia pricing. So it's not just the opportunity to buy a card, there's also a nice discount in here.
With the three lucky winners only being asked to pay ₹110,000, as opposed to the ₹148,990.00 set retail pricing for these Colorful cards, that's still a bit of a win. But very much a bit of a win. It's not like they're being given away, is it?
Still, it's actually almost refreshing given the price gouging we've seen in this tricky launch. Low availability and high demand has never been the friend of the consumer, and graphics cards look set to continue to be a sore point ready to bottleneck everyone's setups.
Getting your hands on a card at all can feel like a win at the moment. Especially one at MSRP, or in this case, technically below it. It's still easy for everyone to feel a bit slanted by this launch. In our RTX 5080 review, we thought it just didn't feel like that much of a step up. Which Nvidia basically admits keeping these new cards MSRP at the same pricing as the previous RTX 40-series.
Unless you're playing games that will make good use of the new Multi Frame Generation technology, the new Blackwell powered cards don't feel all that different to their Ada based ancestors. At least not until developers actually start making use of the neural shaders built into these GPUs via the new Microsoft addition to its DirectX API.
But with cards going out of stock within five minutes on launch, consumers aren't exactly poised to be picky. If you can keep running your old GPU, I'd recommend holding onto it for as long as you can.
