And The First Australian NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Price Is A Lot

Most of the specifications and performance-enhancing features of NVIDIA’s Pascal GPUs, the GTX 1070 and 1080, are largely known by now. And we also know what the American prices of those chips will be.

But nobody knows precisely how much Aussies will be charged for the king of GPUs. And as it turns out, the answer is quite a lot.

A Kotaku Australia reader has sent in a quote from a local retailer quoting the price of a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB at a staggering $1,299 excluding shipping. The figure was apparently published by accident and picked up by Google Cache, although the listing has since been taken down from the main website.

I’ve reached out to other Australian retailers to confirm their pricing, and received mixed reports. PC Case Gear told me they hadn’t received pricing from NVIDIA at the time of writing, but they would be given a figure by May 29 — two days after cards become available in the United States.

Another retailer told me they would begin offering the Founders Edition of the GTX 1080 from $1199. They only did so under the veil of anonymity, however, to avoid risking the wrath of the GPU giant. That would mean the Founders Edition would be priced noticeably above the GTX 980 Ti, which most major retailers are selling for around $870 and $950 according to a StaticICE search.

I asked NVIDIA whether the pricing matched up with their MSRP, and they replied that the Founders Edition MSRP hadn’t been announced to local retailers yet. They added that marketing for the GTX 1080 would not be published until May 20, although they didn’t confirm with me prior to publication whether that was Australian time. (Update: NVIDIA has since confirmed that the embargo for GTX 1080 marketing in Australia is 11:00 PM AEST.)

One hardware vendor anonymously confirmed that NVIDIA hadn’t told them about the MSRP pricing either, although they believed the GTX 1080 would be more competitively priced than the GTX 980 when it launched last year. (And if you’re wondering, here’s a comparison of the specs between the GTX 1080 and its more affordable cousin, the GTX 1070.)

Either way, it seems that we’ll 100% know what retailers are charging by the end of next week. It’s likely that pre-orders for the GTX 1080 — the Founders Edition only, remember — will open up before then too. The new king of the GPU game is still cost-effective — although you might need to get one shipped from the United States.