Nvidia is offering RTX 50-series MSRP pricing in person at PAX West in Seattle this week, selling Founders Edition GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 graphics cards for the price printed on the box rather than whatever the market will bear. GeForce Evangelist Jacob Freeman announced the drop on X, telling attendees to come find him for a card while supplies last. Nvidia is also handing out packs of its GeForce Trading Cards Series 1 alongside the GPUs.
The cards are moving through Nvidia’s Verified Priority Access programme, known as VPA: a lottery scheme the company launched in 2022 to ration Founders Edition RTX 40-series cards and revived in 2025 for the RTX 50-series. Online sign-up for VPA is still open, but Nvidia has increasingly used live events to hand out MSRP stock directly, doing much the same thing last month at QuakeCon in Austin, Texas.
How Verified Priority Access works
VPA exists because Founders Edition boards, Nvidia’s own reference design, are chronically scarcer than partner cards from Asus, MSI, Gigabyte and the rest. Instead of a general online queue, Nvidia is walking the show floor this time: find Freeman at the booth, and if stock remains, buy an RTX 5070 at its $549 MSRP, an RTX 5080 at $999, or an RTX 5090 at $1,999. Nvidia hasn’t disclosed a per-person purchase limit or how many units it brought to the convention.
Why RTX 50-series MSRP pricing is news right now
Getting any RTX 50-series card near MSRP has been getting harder, not easier. Tom’s Hardware’s GPU price tracker shows list prices climbing as much as 39% over the past month across the range, with the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB up 29% and the RTX 5070 up 36%, following a run of regional price increases outside the US. The RTX 5090 has taken the worst of it: the same $1,999 card is now regularly listed above $5,000, partly because its 32GB of GDDR7 memory makes it useful for local AI inference as well as gaming, and partly because supply hasn’t kept pace with either use case.
What buying at MSRP actually saves
At a street price of $5,000, teqpost calculates that Nvidia’s PAX West stock is selling for a saving of more than 60% against what an RTX 5090 currently fetches on the open market, and that’s before counting further rises the price tracker has logged this month. That gap is the entire reason a queue forms whenever Nvidia does this: MSRP availability is now rare enough to be treated as a scheduled event rather than a purchase option.
The same GPU turning up at $1,999 on a convention floor is also showing up inside laptops running Nvidia’s newest upscaling stack; we’ve covered how DLSS 5 hits RTX 5090 laptop frame rates hard, for anyone weighing a mobile RTX 5090 against a desktop Founders Edition bought at MSRP.
Nvidia hasn’t said whether in-person VPA drops will continue past PAX West, which runs at the Seattle Convention Center this week, but back-to-back appearances at QuakeCon and PAX West suggest conventions, not the general online queue, are now the more reliable way to catch Founders Edition stock at MSRP.
