Nvidia’s RTX 4080 Super is the final Lovelace refresh to launch in January, arriving on the last day of the month, and we’ve seen some encouraging signs of how many third-party models of the graphics card might be priced at the MSRP.
We must be cautious around any pre-release pricing leaks, naturally, but it’s definitely interesting to see that German retailer Notebooksbilliger has priced up a host of RTX 4080 Super models (hat tip to VideoCardz).
These are custom boards from third-party graphics card makers, as opposed to the Founders Edition produced by Nvidia, and they can have varied pricing, often ranging quite some way above the MSRP.
The good news in this case is that a bunch of RTX 4080 Super models are at the recommended pricing level, with five at MSRP – and some other versions aren’t too far off that, either.
Notebooksbilliger has the following RTX 4080 Super models pegged at MSRP: Inno3D X3, Gigabyte Windforce 16G, Gigabyte Windforce V2, Asus TUF, and the Zotac Trinity Black Edition.
There are a number of models also pitched only slightly above – 4% over – the MSRP, namely the Palit GamingPro OC, Palit Jetstream OC, and Zotac’s Trinity OC White. Also, Gigabyte’s Gaming OC is only a touch above that (5% over MSRP).
Those are all overclocked models, as the OC label indicates, so you would expect to pay a bit more for them as they used juiced-up clocks and better cooling solutions to keep the card in line.
Analysis: The price is right (hopefully)
With five models at MSRP, and a clutch of overclocked variants only just above that, this looks like a pretty optimistic picture of RTX 4080 Super pricing.
We should underline the note of caution on pre-release pricing, of course, and add plenty of seasoning here – but the prices look realistic enough. And with any luck, they might translate to US pricing that’s pitched very similarly, and for that matter, to other regions as well.
We could theorize that maybe Nvidia felt compelled to push its partners when it comes to RTX 4080 Super pricing. Mainly because this RTX Super refresh is rumored to be the tamest of the three (and the specs suggest that, too). Indeed, we may only see a 5% uplift compared to the vanilla RTX 4080, but where Nvidia has gone for making a big difference is in pricing. The MSRP has been dropped by 20% in the US, so the RTX 4080 Super will sell for $999, a much more competitive price tag than the existing version of the 4080.
If third-party card makers were to push up that price too much for custom boards, though, maybe that’d look bad in the light Nvidia is trying to present this new refresh (washing away the bad memories of the RTX 4080, which sold poorly by all accounts).
At any rate, time will tell – fingers crossed for similarly competitive pricing in the US and elsewhere around the globe, which should make the RTX 4080 Super a good candidate to become one of our picks for the best graphics cards.