If you’ve been searching for an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition card at launch without success, you’re not alone. However, it’s not just that you’ve been unlucky or the scalpers got there first. Instead, Nvidia quietly confirmed that it isn’t immediately making its FE card available, and that instead it will be arriving “later in March,” according to a new leak.
The launch of the RTX 5070 hasn’t been plain sailing for Nvidia, with our RTX 5070 review noting the card’s lack of VRAM, its meager performance, and the failure of the card to live up to Nvidia’s claim that the RTX 5070 will offer RTX 4090 performance. However, for all its foibles, the card is still a reasonable mid-range offering, despite not making it onto our best graphics card guide, and the Founders Edition is a stylish and compact version. As such, many potential RTX 5070 buyers might have been looking forward to picking up that card and this news will come as a blow.
The delay is being reported by Andreas Schilling, editor of German tech site Hardware.luxx, via their X (formerly Twitter) account. They claim they’ve had official word from Nvidia that “the RTX 5070 Founders Edition will be available later in March.” Schilling goes on to confirm that the delay isn’t just related to the German market where the site is based, but worldwide.
This delay further compounds the miserable RTX 5070 stock situation that has followed the card’s launch. Not only was it widely reported that stock was very thin on the ground ahead of launch but, sure enough, stock of cards made by Nvidia’s board partners has sold out already in most regions.
Even more depressingly, there’s clear evidence that a significant number of the buyers of these cards are so-called scalpers who buy the card at the retail price, then resell them on sites such as Ebay. A quick browse of that site shows dozens of cards listed for ludicrously high prices of over $1,000.
Not that Nvidia is the only company suffering this fate. Thanks in part to extremely positive RX 9070 XT reviews, AMD’s new direct rival to the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti has also immediately sold out, despite plenty of evidence that there was plenty of 9070 XT stock in stores ahead of launch.
It’s not clear how long the delay for the RTX 5070 Founders Edition launch will last. At worst, a late March launch means you’ll only have at most just over three weeks to wait for the cards to arrive. There’s still no guarantee stock will be plentiful and not snapped up by scalpers, but if you’re quick, you might be able to snap one up.
To learn more about the crucial technologies at the heart of both AMD and Nvidia’s newest graphics cards, check out our guides to Nvidia DLSS 4 and Nvidia FSR 4, where we analyze the new upscaling and frame generation technologies that are exclusive to the two companies’ latest GPUs.
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