WTF?! The next entry in Nvidia's Lovelace series of graphics cards, the RTX 4070 Ti, doesn't launch until early next month, likely January 5, but it seems nobody told a retailer in Serbia who is apparently selling the card early and for a comically high price.
Redditors discovered the upcoming Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming card for sale in a Serbian store. Gamers in the country will have to pay a high premium to become one of the first to own the GPU: it's priced at 172,229 RSD, including taxes, which converts to around $1,550. That's close to the US MSRP of an RTX 4090.
The retailer is generously offering a discount on the RTX 4070 Ti to those who pay cash for the card. Sadly, even with 10% off, the price is $1,400, which is still a few hundred dollars more than the official RTX 4080 MSRP.
Assuming this is all real and not some elaborate fakery, the stupidly high price will partly be due to the card being sold ahead of its release date. However, a Serbian Reddit user points out that the country has a duopoly on the tech market. When taxes, customs, and greedy merchants are also taken into account, it leads to some of the most expensive tech prices in the EU. As an example, the RTX 4080 retails for $1,700 in Serbia, while the RTX 4090 goes for a minimum of $2,500.
It seems that Serbia isn't the only nation where the RTX 4070 Ti is in stock. Another Redditor shared photos of the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming X Trio from a Costa Rican retailer, though in this case, the cards aren't being sold now; they're just ready for the official launch. The seller is said to be taking pre-orders, but there's no word on prices.
We now know that the RTX 4070 Ti is a rebranded version of the $900 RTX 4080 12GB that Nvidia "unlaunched" in October, leaving only the RTX 4080 16GB, which hasn't been selling very well---unless you count Newegg's figures.
The RTX 4070 Ti features a 295 sq. mm full-fat AD104 GPU, 12GB of DDR6X memory clocked at 21 Gbps, a 192-bit memory bus, and 504 GB/s of bandwidth. There are also 7,680 cores, as well as 240 Tensor cores, 60 ray tracing units, 30 billion transistors, and up to 160 ROPs. Still no word on what the official MSRP will be in the US.