How much would you pay for an RTX 5090 GPU? ASUS wants $3,100 for its ROG Astral LC OC Edition

The ASUS ROG Astral LC GeForce RTX 5090 OC Edition has a truly wallet destroying price tag, and the air-cooled version isn't much cheaper.

How much would you pay for an RTX 5090 GPU? ASUS wants $3,100 for its ROG Astral LC OC Edition
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Tech Reporter
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TL;DR: ASUS has announced pricing for its RTX 5090 and 5080 graphics cards, with the top-end ROG Astral LC GeForce RTX 5090 OC Edition priced at $3,100, exceeding NVIDIA's MSRP by 55%. It's liquid-cooled, and the air-cooled version of the Astral costs $2,800, causing many raised eyebrows from gamers questioning how much a fancy cooling system and PCB is worth.

ASUS has shared pricing details for the full range of its RTX 5090 and 5080 graphics cards, and the top-end model of the Blackwell flagship exceeds the $3,000 mark in a move that has definitely caused a stir.

This is the ASUS ROG Astral LC GeForce RTX 5090 OC Edition - a clear argument for the product name length having a direct correlation to more expensive pricing - and it's official asking price is $3,100.

NVIDIA's MSRP for the RTX 5090 is $2,000, so with this card, ASUS is blowing past that recommendation by 55%. And yes, of course we expect to pay a significant amount more for premium third-party graphics cards, but the ROG Astral LC version appears to be taking the cake (or indeed the cake, its stand, and the table beneath).

ASUS posted this pricing info on Reddit, as you can see above, and you can just imagine what the reaction was to this ROG Astral take on the RTX 5090.

Of course, you are getting a graphics card that will perform a good deal better than the entry-level versions of the RTX 5090 (a phrase that seems almost a contradiction in itself), but really, you're paying an absolute stack of money for a good cooling solution and a fancy PCB plus trimmings therein.

Is that worth an extra 55% over MSRP? We'd suggest not, but then, some folks may just want the best of the best.

How much would you pay for an RTX 5090 GPU? ASUS wants $3,100 for its ROG Astral LC OC Edition 02

Air today, gone tomorrow

There's also an ASUS ROG Astral vanilla OC Edition of the RTX 5090, the difference being that it has traditional air cooling, rather than the liquid cooling which the 'LC' of this absolute top-end model refers to.

However, even for the non-LC version of the ASUS ROG Astral you will stump up an eye-watering $2,800. So, for $300 more you're getting the liquid cooling system, which will at least mean the graphics card is a good deal quieter (and the fan variant of the Astral is pretty noisy, going by the reviews we've seen).

We'd plump for the ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 5090 ourselves (if we could afford any RTX 5090 - which we can't), but the problem is, you can't get hold of that (or any of these GPUs for that matter). The base TUF model is actually at the MSRP of $2,000, although that's a special launch price, and normally it'll be $2,300. For the TUF OC Edition, your wallet is going to be taken to task for $2,500.

While stock remains a huge problem for the RTX 5090 (and of course the RTX 5080), perhaps the one benefit of these ASUS ROG Astral graphics cards is that it won't be too long before they're in-stock, as quite a few folks are going to balk at these price tags, and for good reason.

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* Prices last scanned on 2/18/2025 at 8:07 am CST - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission from any sales.

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Darren has written for numerous magazines and websites in the technology world for almost 30 years, including TechRadar, PC Gamer, Eurogamer, Computeractive, and many more. He worked on his first magazine (PC Home) long before Google and most of the rest of the web existed. In his spare time, he can be found gaming, going to the gym, and writing books (his debut novel – ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ – was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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