Nvidia, Newegg try to keep RTX 50-series cards away from scalpers

If you’re trying to find a next-gen Nvidia graphics card right now, you’re out of luck, especially if you were hoping to pay retail prices. The GeForce RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070 Ti cards were all gone pretty much instantly after launch, gobbled up by eager PC gamers and even more eager scalpers. In response, Nvidia and Newegg are both resurrecting programs to sell more directly to end customers. If you’ve previously shopped for graphics cards, you might be familiar with these programs.

Nvidia’s resurrecting the Verified Priority Access system, which reserves a limited number of the hard-to-find Founder’s Edition cards (RTX 5090 and 5080 only) for verified customers with an Nvidia account. This is only available to US residents whose accounts were created before January 30, 2025. The forum announcement was spotted by KitGuru. Newegg has dusted off the Newegg Shuffle system, which is a customer raffle for popular items, for the newly-launch RTX 5070 Ti. According to the store page, you can enter the raffle for the next five hours (ending at 12 PM Pacific time) and, if selected, have a five-hour buy window later in the day (1 PM to 6 PM).

Neither Nvidia nor Newegg have said exactly exactly how many cards they’re holding in reserve for these systems, or how many might be added to the pools when restocks become available.

There are a few other examples of companies making at least a token effort to sell more reliably to actual end users instead of resellers. Zotac has a system that allows active US members of its Discord server to enter a drawing for the opportunity to buy a card… but that program only had five confirmed RTX 5080 GPUs when it was announced.

We’ve been covering the lamentable state of availability for new Nvidia cards over the last few weeks, so I won’t repeat myself too much here. If you want more details on the actual tech behind them, you can check out our reviews of the RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070 Ti. The 5070 (non-Ti) is the only card yet to launch from the initial CES 2025 announcement, and with a suggested base price of $550, the only one that’s even remotely affordable. Expect it to have similar availability issues when it comes.