A ramped up flow of early-to-mid March period leaks—regarding upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 5060 graphics cards—suggested an official pre-GTC 2025 unveiling of lower-end Blackwell gaming GPUs. Speculative specifications appeared online earlier in the month, but some key technical talking points seemed to be missing. As reported yesterday, insiders believe that Team Green has adjusted its new product release schedule. Leaked roadmaps have outlined GeForce RTX 5060 Ti cards arriving by mid-April 2025, with less potent RTX 5060 models launching around the middle of May. Despite the alleged delay, VideoCardz has continued its investigation into pre-launch conditions. Their latest report points to full GeForce RTX 5060 Ti specifications being distributed to board partners, at least in the recent past.

Leaked details seemingly reconfirm the existence of 16 GB and 8 GB variants (on a 128-bit memory bus); both utilizing the same GB206-300-A1 GPU with 4608 CUDA cores. VideoCardz disclosed a couple of finer (new) details:"based on the specs we have, both models will ship with 28 Gbps memory. This means that the bandwidth is 448 GB/s, which is 55% higher than the last-gen model. Moving on to GPU clocks, NVIDIA has set a 2407 MHz base clock and a 2572 MHz boost clock for this GB206-based model. This means that the base clock is 97 MHz and the boost is 37 MHz higher than the RTX 4060 Ti." The fresh leak suggest that a few of Team Green's AIBs will be configuring their custom designs with 8-pin power connectors; sufficient for a reported 180 W TDP-rated product. VideoCardz anticipates that the vast majority of GeForce RTX 5060 Ti models will utilize 16-pin connectors. Unfortunately, finalized price guides were not discovered during recent sleuthing sessions.

NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang made some interesting commentary for the Financial Times, stating that the company will procure over half a trillion US Dollars worth of electronics over the next four years, and it it plans to keep hundreds of billions from the supply chain procurement in the US. "Overall, we will procure, over the course of the next four years, probably half a trillion dollars worth of electronics in total. And I think we can easily see ourselves manufacturing several hundred billion of it here in the US," said Jensen for FT. NVIDIA currently manufactures its silicon at TSMC's facilities, as well as electronics like motherboards and servers at Foxconn. However, the geopolitical situation is making NVIDIA reconsider its supply chain dependencies, and the company is looking for more US-based manufacturing.

NVIDIA confirmed that its latest "Blackwell" series of GPUs, including the latest Blackwell Ultra, are being manufactured at TSMC's Arizona facilities. TSMC announced a $100 billion investment in its Arizona expansion, and NVIDIA is ready to take up more of TSMC's capacity to meet its ever-growing demand for GPUs. During the GTC 2025 event, Jensen noted that only four cloud service providers will use 3.6 million GPUs this year. That is without any AI labs and enterprises, which are massive consumers of GPUs (xAI only has 200,000 GPU clusters). To continue manufacturing excellence so customers won't suffer, NVIDIA is also looking at other options for supply chain manufacturing partners. Intel, the only US-based company capable of producing advanced silicon, is a potential target for NVIDIA. "We evaluate their foundry technology on a regular basis, and we are ongoing in doing that... We look for opportunities to be a customer of theirs... I have every confidence that Intel can do it," added Jensen, who also stated that NVIDIA is interested in silicon manufacturing and chip packaging services, as Intel's Foveros 3D packaging and other technologies are attractive for Team Green.

The "standard" ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 OC Edition is already a really an "astronomically expensive" prospect (if you can find available stock); launch MSRP was $2800, but retailers pushed that figure beyond the $3000 mark. An even fancier golden variant exists—as a reminder; news outlets picked up on the existence of a "Dhahab" model early last month. This luxuriously decorated collector piece was likely introduced as a regional exclusive, for MENA (Middle-East and North Africa). This week, ASUS managed to sneak one gold encrusted sample out to San Francisco, California.

Ernest Cheng—Director of Marketing at the firm's North American branch—shared a photo (via LinkedIn) of the very unique ROG Astral RTX 5090 Dhahab OC Edition model; freshly scribbled on by Jensen Huang during GTC 2025. The ASUS exec commented on this blessing: "graphics card is one of a kind when it's been anointed. But it says a lot more when it's a Golden ROG RTX 5090 Astral." Press outlets reckon that this extremely special item will be auctioned off for charity; the presence of Team Green CEO's autograph and slogan ("RTX ON!") will boost its value severalfold. A Jensen Huang-signed ROG MATRIX RTX 4090 PLATINUM card attracted a top bid of $16,000; Der8auer (aka Roman Hartung) was officially congratulated as the winner back in late 2023.

Update 18:02 UTC: ASUS has confirmed that it will be supporting a local charity: "we are extremely honored to have this special edition ROG Astral RTX 5090 Dhahab OC graphics card, signed by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. This card will be officially auctioned to support relief efforts for the California wildfires in Los Angeles."

Yesterday evening, the NVIDIA AI Developer social media account sent out a red alert regarding a time limited sale of flagship-tier Blackwell gaming hardware: "GeForce RTX 5090s are available at the Gear Store in the park right now at GTC 2025. 90 units are available for the next 30 minutes, with more coming tomorrow. Come say hi!" PC hardware news outlets have picked up on Team Green's latest stock bulletin, with Tom's Hardware disclosing some extra details. Under normal circumstances, NVIDIA's Gear Store Mobile Truck would be selling fairly standard merchandise—e.g. T-shirts, sweaters, hats, etc. According to the latest reports, the company's mobile pop-up store is taking orders for add-in-boards (AIB) GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 models. An information placard advertises old school/launch day guide prices of $1999 and $999 (respectively).

Tom's Hardware noted several caveats: "the graphics cards must be purchased from NVIDIA's van from 7 AM to 12 PM on Thursday or Friday and then picked up at South Hall main entrance the same day. The graphics boards are available to conference pass ($1145 for one day, or $2295 for five days) and exhibit pass holders only; with a limit of one card per person." According to folks on the ground, Team Green and its board partners have stockpiled a thousand of each highly-desirable GPU model at the San Jose Convention Center. The first waves of time-limited batches were made available yesterday (March 19). Demand for flagship and top-end GeForce RTX 50 series cards has far exceeded supply, starting back in late January. Following an absorption of plentiful feedback, NVIDIA revived its "Verified Priority Access" scheme a couple of weeks ago. This anti-scalping initiative was advertised as offering: "a limited number of verified GeForce gamers and creators in the United States the opportunity to purchase one GeForce RTX 5090 or RTX 5080 Founders Edition graphics card from the NVIDIA Marketplace."

Graphics card price watchers have highlighted refreshing downward motion in Europe, apparently affecting three out of the four GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards. VideoCardz received a couple of email tip-offs from its pan-European audience, prompting the publication of a short investigative piece. NVIDIA's slight adjustment of official pricing for GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 models is the result of a strengthened Euro. The US dollar's value has dropped by roughly 3.9 %; according to recent detective work, focusing on German trends. Team Green's "generous" reductions have arrived roughly two weeks after a stabilization of the USD-EUR exchange rate.

Curiously, the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is an outlier here—NVIDIA did not reduce its German guide price (€879 + VAT) for this upper-mid-range offer. A Founders Edition does not exist at this GPU level, so Team Green has tasked its board partners with the creation of so-called "MSRP conformant" alternatives. One of VideoCardz's tipsters has observed various GeForce RTX 50 series models simply "rotting on shelves," due to potential buyers balking at unreasonable retailer-implemented price hikes. NVIDIA's minor changes (4.3 to 4.6 %) are unlikely to make a noticeable impact across the Euro zone.

Supermicro, Inc., a Total IT Solution Provider for AI, Cloud, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is announcing new systems and rack solutions powered by the NVIDIA's Blackwell Ultra platform, featuring the NVIDIA HGX B300 NVL16 and NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 platforms. Supermicro and NVIDIA's new AI solutions strengthen leadership in AI by delivering breakthrough performance for the most compute-intensive AI workloads, including AI reasoning, agentic AI, and video inference applications.

"At Supermicro, we are excited to continue our long-standing partnership with NVIDIA to bring the latest AI technology to market with the NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra Platforms," said Charles Liang, president and CEO, Supermicro. "Our Data Center Building Block Solutions approach has streamlined the development of new air and liquid-cooled systems, optimized to the thermals and internal topology of the NVIDIA HGX B300 NVL16 and GB300 NVL72. Our advanced liquid-cooling solution delivers exceptional thermal efficiency, operating with 40℃ warm water in our 8-node rack configuration, or 35℃ warm water in double-density 16-node rack configuration, leveraging our latest CDUs. This innovative solution reduces power consumption by up to 40% while conserving water resources, providing both environmental and operational cost benefits for enterprise data centers."

MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation, a leading server platform design manufacturer and a subsidiary of MiTAC Holdings Corporation, will present its latest innovations in AI infrastructure at GTC 2025. At booth #1505, MiTAC Computing will showcase its cutting-edge AI server platforms, fully optimized for NVIDIA MGX architecture, including the G4527G6, which supports NVIDIA H200 NVL platform and NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition to address the evolving demands of enterprise AI workloads.

Enabling Next-Generation AI with High-Performance Computing
With the increasing adoption of generative AI and accelerated computing, MiTAC Computing introduces the latest NVIDIA MGX-based server solutions, the MiTAC G4527G6, designed to support complex AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. Powered by Intel Xeon 6 processors, the G4527G6 accommodates up to eight NVIDIA GPUs, 8 TB of DDR5-6400 memory, sixteen hot-swappable E1.s drives, four NVIDIA ConnectX -7 NICs for high-speed east-west data transfer, and an NVIDIA BlueField -3 DPU for efficient north-south connectivity. The G4527G6 further enhances workload scalability with the NVIDIA NVLink interconnect, ensuring seamless performance for enterprise AI and high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

Today, at NVIDIA GTC, Lenovo unveiled new Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA solutions designed to accelerate AI adoption and boost business productivity by fast-tracking agentic AI that can reason, plan and take action to reach goals faster. The validated, full-stack AI solutions enable enterprises to quickly build and deploy AI agents for a broad range of high-demand use cases, increasing productivity, agility and trust while accelerating the next wave of AI reasoning for the new era of agentic AI.

New global IDC research commissioned by Lenovo reveals that ROI remains the greatest AI adoption barrier, despite a three-fold spend increase. AI agents are revolutionizing enterprise workflows and lowering barriers to ROI by supporting employees with complex problem-solving, coding, and multistep planning that drives speed, innovation and productivity. As CIOs and business leaders seek tangible return on AI investment, Lenovo is delivering hybrid AI solutions that unleash and customize agentic AI at every scale.

PNY announced today it is adding the new NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition, RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q Workstation Edition, RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell, RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell, and RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell graphics cards to its lineup of NVIDIA RTX PRO GPU offerings for professionals.

Built for professionals and the future of work, NVIDIA RTX PRO Desktop GPUs based on the revolutionary NVIDIA Blackwell architecture deliver exceptional performance for AI-enhanced creative, design, and engineering workflows. Featuring the latest generation Tensor Cores, RT Cores, and up to 96 GB of ultra-high-speed GDDR7 memory, they enable groundbreaking advancements in AI, ray tracing, and neural graphics technology. Supercharge workstations for the next era of AI-driven workflows with the ultimate tools for professionals.

Marking one year since the launch of the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) announces new AI PCs, infrastructure, software and services advancements to accelerate enterprise AI innovation at any scale. Successful AI deployments are vital for enterprises to remain competitive, but challenges like system integration and skill gaps can delay the value enterprises realize from AI. More than 75% of organizations want their infrastructure providers to deliver capabilities across all aspects of the AI adoption journey, driving customer demand for simplified AI deployments that can scale.

As the top provider of AI centric infrastructure, Dell Technologies - in collaboration with NVIDIA - provides a consistent experience across AI infrastructure, software and services, offering customers a one-stop shop to scale AI initiatives from deskside to large-scale data center deployments.

Giga Computing, a subsidiary of GIGABYTE and an industry leader in generative AI servers and advanced cooling technologies, today announced participation at NVIDIA GTC 2025 to bring to the market the best in GPU-based solutions for generative AI, media acceleration, and large language models (LLM). To this end, GIGABYTE booth #1409 at NVIDIA GTC showcases a rack-scale turnkey AI solution, GIGAPOD, that offers both air and liquid-cooling designs for the NVIDIA HGX B300 NVL16 system. Also, on display at the booth is a compute node from the newly announced NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 rack-scale solution. And for modularized compute architecture are two servers supporting the newly announced NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition.

Complete AI solution - GIGAPOD
With the depth of expertise in hardware and system design, Giga Computing has combined infrastructure hardware, platform software, and architecting service to deliver scalable units composed of GIGABYTE GPU servers with NVIDIA GPU baseboards, while running GIGABYTE POD Manager, a powerful software suite designed to enhance operational efficiency, streamline management, and optimize resource utilization. GIGAPOD's scalable unit is designed for either nine air-cooled racks or five liquid-cooled racks. Giga Computing offers two approaches for the same goal, one powerful GPU cluster using NVIDIA HGX Hopper and Blackwell GPU platforms at scale to meet demand for all AI data centers.

MSI, a leading global provider of high-performance server solutions, showcased its cutting-edge 4U and 2U AI platforms built on the NVIDIA MGX reference architecture at GTC 2025, held from March 18-21 at booth 909. Designed to meet the diverse demands of AI, HPC, and data-intensive applications, MSI's MGX-based AI servers deliver scalable performance and robust resilience. These platforms cater to the needs of enterprise and cloud data centers, leveraging modular, building-block features to optimize the strengths of AI workloads and drive next-level high-performance computing.

"AI adoption has become a critical focus for enterprise data centers, as organizations look to harness advanced AI capabilities to gain competitive advantages," said Danny Hsu, General Manager of Enterprise Platform Solutions at MSI. "MSI's AI servers are designed to meet these evolving needs, offering the scalability, flexibility, and resilience required to keep pace with rapidly growing AI workloads. By integrating the NVIDIA MGX reference architecture, we empower enterprises to build future-proof infrastructure that maximizes performance while minimizing complexity and downtime."

ASUS today joined GTC 2025 as a Diamond sponsor to showcase the latest ASUS AI POD with the NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 platform. The company is also proud to announce that it has already garnered substantial order placements, marking a significant milestone in the technology industry. At the forefront of AI innovation, ASUS also presents the latest AI servers in the Blackwell and HGX family line-up. These include ASUS XA NB3I-E12 powered by NVIDIA B300 NVL16, ASUS ESC NB8-E11 with NVIDIA DGX B200 8-GPU, ASUS ESC N8-E11V with NVIDIA HGX H200, and ASUS ESC8000A-E13P/ESC8000-E12P supporting NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition with MGX architecture. With a strong focus on fostering AI adoption across industries, ASUS is positioned to provide comprehensive infrastructure solutions in combination with the NVIDIA AI Enterprise and NVIDIA Omniverse platforms, empowering clients to accelerate their time to market.

By integrating the immense power of the NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 server platform, ASUS AI POD offers exceptional processing capabilities—empowering enterprises to tackle massive AI challenges with ease. Built with NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra, GB300 NVL72 leads the new era of AI with optimized compute, increased memory, and high-performance networking, delivering breakthrough performance.

ASUS today announces its groundbreaking AI supercomputer, ASUS Ascent GX10, powered by the state-of-the-art NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip. This revolutionary device places the formidable capabilities of a petaFLOP-scale AI supercomputer directly onto the desks of developers, AI researchers and data scientists around the globe.

As the size and complexity of generative AI models grow, local development efforts face increasing challenges. Prototyping, tuning and inferencing large models require substantial memory and compute performance. To address these needs, Ascent GX10 is designed to provide developers with a powerful, economical desktop solution for AI development.

NVIDIA today unveiled NVIDIA DGX personal AI supercomputers powered by the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform. DGX Spark—formerly Project DIGITS—and DGX Station, a new high-performance NVIDIA Grace Blackwell desktop supercomputer powered by the NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra platform, enable AI developers, researchers, data scientists and students to prototype, fine-tune and inference large models on desktops. Users can run these models locally or deploy them on NVIDIA DGX Cloud or any other accelerated cloud or data center infrastructure.

DGX Spark and DGX Station bring the power of the Grace Blackwell architecture, previously only available in the data center, to the desktop. Global system builders to develop DGX Spark and DGX Station include ASUS, Dell, HP Inc. and Lenovo.

NVIDIA today announced the next evolution of the NVIDIA Blackwell AI factory platform, NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra—paving the way for the age of AI reasoning. NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra boosts training and test-time scaling inference—the art of applying more compute during inference to improve accuracy—to enable organizations everywhere to accelerate applications such as AI reasoning, agentic AI and physical AI.

Built on the groundbreaking Blackwell architecture introduced a year ago, Blackwell Ultra includes the NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 rack-scale solution and the NVIDIA HGX B300 NVL16 system. The GB300 NVL72 delivers 1.5x more AI performance than the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, as well as increases Blackwell's revenue opportunity by 50x for AI factories, compared with those built with NVIDIA Hopper.

BOXX Technologies, the leading innovator of high-performance computers, rendering systems, and servers, announced that as a supplier of NVIDIA-Certified Systems, BOXX workstations will feature the new NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition and NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q Workstation Edition GPUs. Designed for creative professionals, these NVIDIA Blackwell architecture GPUs combine breakthrough AI inference, ray tracing, and neural rendering technology with major performance and memory improvements to drive demanding creative, design, and engineering workflows. BOXX will be among the first computer hardware manufacturers offering the new GPUs inside multiple workstation form factors.

"From our desk side APEXX workstations to our FLEXX and RAXX data center platforms, BOXX is taking our record-setting performance to new heights with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition GPUs," said BOXX CEO Kirk Schell. "Our systems equipped with these groundbreaking GPUs are purpose-built for creative professionals who demand the best, so whether its architects, engineers, and content creators, or data scientists and large scale enterprise deployments, BOXX accelerates mission critical work while maintaining unparalleled performance, reliability, and support."

NVIDIA today launched the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell series of professional graphics cards. These cards are based on the latest GeForce "Blackwell" graphics architecture, and the three chips the company already launched on it. Leading the pack, is the RTX PRO 6000, a card that completely maxes out the massive "GB202" silicon, featuring more shaders than even the GeForce RTX 5090, albeit at lower clock speeds. The idea behind this product is to give pro-vis users more shader power, driving a large amount of GDDR7 ECC memory. Specifically, the card comes with 24,064 CUDA cores across all 192 SM physically present on the silicon, besides 768 Tensor cores, 192 RT cores, 768 TMUs, and 192 ROPs. The card gets a humungous 96 GB of ECC GDDR7 memory across the chip's 512-bit wide memory interface, probably using 48 Gbit density memory chips. The card has a TGP of 600 W, making out the 12V2x6 power input. It comes with a board design resembling the RTX 5090.

Next up, is the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q. This card has essentially the same core-configuration as the RTX PRO 6000, but with a reduced TGP, and a simpler 2-slot board design that uses a lateral-blower. This card is meant for machines with multiple such cards installed, though something that isn't quite a rendering server. Lastly, there's the RTX PRO 6000 Server Edition. This card, again, has identical core-config to the others in the lineup, but with a board design optimized for rackmount servers and large rendering farms. The cooler relies on the rack's airflow for cooling.

PNY officially introduced its launch lineup of GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards at CES 2025; all brand-new offerings were plainly labelled as "Triple Fan" models. Yesterday, VideoCardz alerted its readership to the emergence of "Plus" variants—all utilizing upper-mid-range NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5070 Ti "Blackwell" GPU. In recent times, several of Team Green's board partners have stealthily added new products to web presences without any PR fanfare accompaniment. Last week, ZOTAC quietly expanded its SOLID GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti product ranges with "slimmer" CORE options.

PNY's four freshest additions are dubbed "Triple Fan Plus"—quite fittingly, this updated moniker refers to larger card dimensions. Price and launch information was not available at the time of writing, but we can safely assume that their GeForce RTX 5070 Ti ARGB Triple Fan Plus OC SKU will sit at the top of the American AIB's resized pack. A non-overclocked ARGB-lit model is present on TPU's GPU database, alongside non-ARGB OC and standard variants. PNY's Triple Fan Plus shroud design is a chunky unit; VideoCardz noted growth (over vanilla variants) in two dimensions—gaining 1.7 cm in width, and roughly 3 cm in length. The already released Triple Fan housing officially occupied "2.8"-slots, but the larger "Plus" sibling is a proper 3-slot space filler. VideoCardz highlighted revised retail packaging—instead of a simple side-printed "GeForce RTX" logo, Plus boxes are adorned with a full GPU readout: "GeForce RTX 5070 Ti." The newer shroud design seems to sport shinier black accents, and wider ARGB lighting channels.

ASRock Rack Inc., the leading innovative server company, will showcase its high-performance AI server lineup at GTC 2025 in San Jose, California, from March 18-21. The featured solutions include next-gen AI servers based on the NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra platform and RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition, and the debut of the liquid-cooled 4U8X-GNR2.

Agentic AI, autonomous systems that perceive, decide, and act, is gaining traction across industries, from healthcare to robotics. The growing demand for real-time interactions and adaptive learning is driving the need for accelerated computing servers with exceptional computational power. At GTC today, ASRock Rack showcases servers based on NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra, the latest addition to the NVIDIA Blackwell accelerated computing platform, offering optimized compute and increased memory, leading the way for a new era of AI reasoning, agentic AI, and physical AI applications.

Officially, NVIDIA has only revealed mobile variants of its GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" GPU series going down to RTX 5070. At CES 2025, Jensen Huang's keynote presentation proposed a $1299 entry point for GB206-equipped gaming laptops—rated up to 800 AI TOPS. As demonstrated by recent market trends, "MSRP" recommendations are widely viewed as whimsical recommendations (at best). Pre-orders for upper crust to mid-range GeForce RTX 50-series laptops opened up on February 25, but the missing ROP (Raster Operations Pipeline) problem has seemingly spread to Blackwell's mobile offshoot. Reports suggest that necessary investigations have pushed initial customer-bound deliveries into April. Presumably, unannounced lower end products—in GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5050 Mobile form—are similarly delayed.

Earlier today, momomo_us—a notable source of pre-launch information—unearthed an alleged "Razer-authored" new product document. The American-Singaporean brand appears to be preparing a multitude of Razer Blade 16 (2025) SKUs, with a series identified as "RZ09-0528." The leaked MSRP guide contains a major error; Razer's forthcoming flagship model—powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" APU and GeForce RTX 5090 Mobile GPU—will not arrive at retail/e-tail with a $1499 price tag. Focusing on the opposite end of Razer's chart, VideoCardz highlighted the $1999 OLED-equipped SKU—featuring a Ryzen AI 9 365 processor and Team Green's unannounced GeForce RTX 5060 Mobile GPU. The speculative steep asking price is not a big surprise, given the expected tagging on of Razer "premium tax." Mid-way through last week, "lowly" GeForce RTX 5050-powered laptops were accidentally listed by retail outlets. The cheapest offering was advertised with a $1720 (including VAT) price point—based on these recent (possibly unfinalized) data points, industry watchdogs have predicted steep asking prices for even the most basic of Blackwell mobile options.

"Second wave" ASUS price hikes were documented online over the past weekend; affecting air-cooled premium ROG Astral and mid-tier TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 5090 models. Looking at the company's North American webshop, visitors noticed a freshly adjusted price for the ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 32 GB OC Edition—going from a previous level of $3079.99 up to $3359.99. Curiously, the asking price of a liquid-cooled sibling was not adjusted—remaining at a "first wave" point of $3409.99. The "cheapest" model—TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 5090 (non-OC)—experienced a $460 (representing 20%) price hike, bringing total cost of ownership up to $2759.99. As a reminder, NVIDIA's baseline MSRP guideline was $1999—as announced at CES 2025—but ROG Astral and TUF Gaming designs demand a premium or two for fancier feature sets. VideoCardz has fervently explored worrying market trends in the recent past; several of NVIDIA's big board partner players have jacked up asking prices for GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards. Availability of stock is still a major sore point for potential buyers, who were not able to secure launch day wares. Despite a driving up of costs, the ASUS US webstore has absolutely zero stock of GeForce RTX 5090 SKUs—at the time of writing.

In addition, VideoCardz and other PC hardware media outlets noted price hikes affecting the manufacturer's stable of recently launched AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series TUF Gaming and PRIME models. In the absence of AMD-built (MBA) reference card designs, board partners were tasked with the providing of baseline "MSRP" conformant custom cards. The ASUS PRIME Radeon RX 9070 XT OC and RX 9070 OC Editions were readied as $599 and $549 options (respectively). Weekend sleuthing work put the spotlight on newly adjusted price points of $719.99 and $659.99 (respectively)—representing further cases of plain 20% elevations over baseline. AMD's debut batch of RDNA 4 cards was met with unprecedented demand earlier on in March, but secondary/tertiary stock shipments face unclear market conditions—Team Red GPU enthusiasts have (similarly) voiced their collective displeasure about elevated prices at retail. Mid-way through last week, the PC hardware community heard about ASUS leadership considering a new pricing strategy. The company is reportedly accelerating its manufacturing exodus from China.

MSI's latest high-end gaming laptops, including the Titan 18 HX AI, Raider 18 HX AI, and Vector 16 HX AI, feature Intel Core Ultra 200 HX series CPUs and NVIDIA RTX 50 series GPUs, while Raider A18 HX and Vector A18 HX run on AMD Ryzen 9000 series. With NVIDIA's last major GPU upgrade in over two years, these laptops deliver top-tier performance for ultra-high-resolution gaming. Beyond gaming, MSI's Titan, Raider, Vector, and Stealth series excel in AI applications, particularly Small Language Models (SLM), making them ideal for both gaming and AI-driven tasks.

Next-Gen GPUs: A Breakthrough for AI Applications
NVIDIA's latest RTX 50 series GPUs, built on the cutting-edge Blackwell architecture, introduce 5th-generation Tensor Cores, 4th-generation RT Cores, and Neural Rendering technology for the first time. With expanded memory capacity and GDDR7, these GPUs optimize AI-enhanced neural computations, reducing memory usage while boosting graphics rendering and AI processing efficiency. This results in unmatched performance for both gaming and creative workloads, enabling smoother, more efficient execution of complex tasks.

ZOTAC has quietly introduced its brand-new SOLID CORE graphics card design—four GeForce RTX 50-series models appeared on the brand's website at some point last week. An official press release was not issued alongside the fresh publication of product pages. On first inspection, the Hong Kong-based manufacturer seems to be reusing their existing SOLID shroud and backplate setup. As reported by VideoCardz, ZOTAC's engineering team has implemented a very mild shrink in one dimension. Triple-fan cooled SOLID COREs have arrived with a "slimmer profile" 2.5 slot design (56 mm/2.2 inches), albeit with an I/O bracket that still occupies three rows. The original SOLID card is a substantial 3.5-slot prospect; with its shroud's height measured at 68 mm/2.7 inches.

Specification sheets for SOLID CORE GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti SKUs (standard and OC) advertise familiar feature sets—barring a difference in height, the usual SOLID provisions are present. Highlights include a vapor chamber-based "IceStorm 3.0 Advanced Cooling" solution, BladeLink Fans, 12V-2x6 Safety Light, and SPECTRA RGB Lighting. Circa-CES 2025, NVIDIA and its board partners were keenly advertising some "SFF-Ready" products, but ZOTAC's flagship and high-end "Blackwell" GB203 GPU-based models are distinct space fillers—even in 2.5-slot form. The company's GeForce RTX 5070 SOLID design exists as a proper 2-slot solution; VideoCardz believes that a variation of this shroud will be attached to upcoming GeForce RTX 5060 Ti models.

NVIDIA has published a research paper on DLSS version 4, its AI rendering technology for real-time graphics performance. The system integrates advancements in frame generation, ray reconstruction, and latency reduction. The flagship Multi-Frame Generation feature generates three additional frames for every native frame. The DLSS 4 later on brings the best looking frames to the user quickly to make is seem like a real rendering. At the core of DLSS 4 is a shift from convolutional neural networks to transformer models. These new AI architectures excel at capturing spatial-temporal dependencies, improving ray-traced affect quality by 30-50% according to NVIDIA's benchmarks. The technology processes each AI-generated frame in just 1 ms on RTX 5090 GPUs—significantly faster than the 3.25 ms required by DLSS 3. For competitive gaming, the new Reflex Frame Warp feature reduces input latency by up to 75%, achieving 14 ms in THE FINALS and under 3 ms in VALORANT, according to NVIDIA's own benchmarks.

DLSS 4's implementation leverages Blackwell-specific architecture capabilities, including FP8 tensor cores and fused CUDA kernels. The optimized pipeline incorporates vertical layer fusion and memory optimizations that keep computational overhead manageable despite using transformer models, which are twice as large as previous CNN implementations. This efficiency enables real-time performance even with the substantially more complex AI processing. The unified AI pipeline reduces manual tuning requirements for ray-traced effects, allowing studios to implement advanced path tracing across diverse hardware configurations. The design also addresses gaming challenges like interpolating fast-moving UI elements and particle effects and reducing artifacts in high-motion scenes. NVIDIA's hardware flip metering and Blackwell-induced display engine integration ensure precise frame pacing of newly generated frames for smooth, high-refresh-rate gaming, with accurate imagery.