Retailer Newegg sold out of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs "within minutes"

Online hardware retailer Newegg has reported that it sold out of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs "within minutes" and broke down the surge of customer activity around the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090.

"The response to the NVIDIA RTX 50 Series has been extraordinary," said Jim Tseng, VP of Product Management in a press release.

"The overwhelming demand reaffirms the gaming and PC community’s enthusiasm for the very best technology. For our customers who have not yet been able to secure a GPU, we’re committed to working with NVIDIA and our AIB (Add-In Board) partners to ensure future restocks and continued availability. Getting the latest cards into our customers is our passion, and we’re proud to also offer a GPU trade-in program that makes it more affordable for customers to upgrade to the latest generation of video cards."

Newegg revealed that it took only 20 minutes for the site to sell its entire RTX 50 series inventory, and that, unsurprisingly, traffic to the site saw an 8 to 10X boost. Nine out of the top ten searches on the site were for the GPUs, and made up 18 of the sites 25 most visited pages.

While it's good news for Newegg, consumers have been frustrated by the apparent scarcity of the GPUs, and the appearance of units on bidding sites with astronomical mark ups like over $6,000 for the RTX 5090, a 200% increase on the original retail price.

In response, a spokesman for NVIDIA with the title Tim@Nvidia posted reassurances on the company's forums.

"We expect significant demand for the GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 and believe stock-outs may happen. NVIDIA & our partners are shipping more stock to retail every day to help get GPUs into the hands of gamers."

Manufacturers like MSI had warned that the units could be in short supply, with Chinese New Year being cited as major factor in the production rate.