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 They added that marketing for the GTX 1080 would not be published until May 20, although they didn’t confirm with me prior to publication whether that was Australian time.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.
Comments
61 responses to “And The First Australian NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Price Is A Lot”
I smell a tax write-off!
That’s why I like being a video producer… Buffs to my gaming rig = legitimate business expenses! =)
Well aren’t you a-
Now now.
“Cheaper”.
Wasn’t this site a buzz about how cheap the card was going to be based on there guess?
The US pricing isn’t unreasonable, and if you can find a good deal on shipping …
It’ll be interesting to see where Polaris lands.
I didn’t say it was. I was saying kotaku and there sister sites were guessing an Australian release price well under the $1000 mark. Just saying they were a bit off. It seemed unreasonable being so cheap. These leaked prices seem a lot closer to what I would have guessed.
I had a go at Campbell Simpson in his article where he guessed a thousand dollars and headlined it as a confirmed Australian pricing.
Felt like we really weren’t getting top notch journalism then.
That said I’m loving the detail and legwork you’ve put in Alex, cheers!
I never said anything about confirmed pricing, mate. I shared US MSRPs, as well as price guides shared with me by a contact within Nvidia and my own estimates.
And it should come as precisely no surprise that Australian retailers are gouging the f**k out of the price. It’s a more expensive card than 980Ti, sure, but wholesalers and retailers over here seem to think that a more favourable exchange rate just means they can make more money.
And the fact remains that you can ship it from Nvidia.com and have it landed under $1000 if your freight forwarding costs less than $200.
Oh get off your high horse and stop acting like you did nothing wrong.
Your headline in case you forgot:
Now perhaps you read that and think it means an article where someone made a rough guess at a price, but pretty much anyone else would assume a journalist has you know a source…
Especially if they knew you were actually at an Nvidia event.
In that article you also specifically mention a big drop from a $1200 price point. In case you need a reminder:
Please show some integrity, you tried to get some traffic with an early headline promising information we were eager for that you didn’t properly source, but tried to be cagey enough with your wording that you could wiggle it out when you were rightfully called out.
Or just keep on being defensive and make me less and less likely to want to visit Gizmodo.
With all due respect, you have no idea what I put into that article. Like I said, I reported the US MSRP, I talked to my contact within Nvidia, and I made estimates based on the previous two generations’ US to AU comparisons. It wasn’t a cheap grab for traffic, I was at the event and reporting what I was told and what I was hearing.
I had a source, and I still trust that source’s information. And now, it’s extremely obvious to me if not you, Australian distributors are fucking everyone over by throwing a ridiculous mark up on a new flagship card. $1499 (before ‘discount’) on a $US699 card? You think that’s genuinely what Nvidia is targeting, a 50% price jump or more on current 980Ti prices?
If you don’t get that, and you don’t want to visit Gizmodo any more, then I can’t change that for you and I don’t feel any obligation to do so.
Frabkly it doesn’t matter how much work you put in to that article, the headline was misleading and I wasn’t the only one who told you that.
This isn’t the first time your professionalism and attitude has rubbed me the wrong way.
Also why shouldn’t I believe that Nvidia hasn’t jacked the MSRP up for Australians? In the same way pretty much every other game publisher and manufacturer does? Our MSRP has been NDA’d, why do that when you announced US pricing weeks ago?
By blaming retailers before the information is in you’re just trying to justify your own estimate, the accuracy of which wasn’t even the issue originally.
You had an awful click bait headline that was supposed to answer questions we’re still waiting on an answer to two weeks later.
Also you really do have the power to make me read Gizmodo, do good work and respect your readers. The Kotaku crew keep me coming here so as long as someone like you doesn’t actively make me avoid the sister site links I’ll click them.
Sorry to say it man, but Zimmy has a fair point.
I did a google search, I saw your headline of “GeForce GTX 1080 And GTX 1070: Australian Release Date And Price”, and I immediately got excited and clicked the link – it very clearly ‘suggested’ that the article was going to reveal Australian pricing.
Then I read the article, found that it offered absolutely no useful information about pricing that I couldn’t have easily figured out myself, and realised I had been tricked into washing 10 minutes of my life.
If the title was more accurate in terms of what the content of the article was (e.g. “estimates of Australian pricing”) I wouldn’t have even clicked the link.
It absolutely made me feel like the title was intentionally worded to mislead people into clicking on the link I can’t prove that this was the intention, but it sure as hell comes across that way.
The article was ok but this comment section has been the best part by far. Also I’m with zimmy on this one.
Right on
That article annoyed me big time. Especially because it was the highlight article for a few days
When I read a title that says “Australian release date and price”
I expect to see a confirmed release date and confirmed price for Australia
This isn’t reddit
To be fair, while nvidia were sayiong $600 US MSRP, it’s an utter lie since they’re pricing their reference card (the ‘founder’s edition’) at $700 and at this point all the others are making their first run ‘founders edition’ cards based off the same reference design, presumably so they also can charge $700+ USD for it.
And right now $700 USD is about $1000 AUD. Add 10% GST and you’re at $1100, so $1200 AU when you factor in the cost to ship to Australia, retailer overheads etc. sounds about right. Stupidly expensive, but all new high-end graphics cards are stupidly expensive.
Huh?
$600 for standard card, $700 for founders card. Founders edition chip is better than the standard chip as it allows more headroom in OC.
EDIT:
Sorry I am stupid.
Sorry, isn’t that incorrect? I think you’ll find the “founders edition” is in fact just a reference card with a slightly “better” shroud. It isnt a specially binned chip or anything.
You are right. I screwed up, initial reports were saying they were high binned chips for more OC which was completely incorrect.
nVIdia borked the marketing on it so hard. That’s what I initially thought too. But actually they’ve re-branded ‘reference card’ as ‘founders edition’ and are charging US $100 more over MSRP for it, presumably with the expectation that the cards will run $600-800 and they’re right in the center of that. But of course, this just means that all the manufacturers (check the websites of EVGA, MSI, Gigabyte…) are going to do their own ‘Founders Edition’ and charge the same as nvidia for it. So effectively it’ll be MSRP $600 but the $600 cards will probably not hit the market until 3-6 months down the line.
(Speaking of borking the marketing – 1080 is a terrible, terrible name. Go search for a ‘GeForce 1080’ and you’ll mainly get a myriad of laptops with 1080p screens and GeForce GPUs…)
Would anyone seriously type gefore 1080 and not GTX 1080?
A search for GTX1080 gives you exactly what you want.
Try doing it on Amazon.
Amazon Australia doesn’t stock them, but it works fine when i search for GTX 1080 on the US site
The price on these things normally convert more or less 1:1 once you account for GST (US prices don’t include taxes), currency conversion, shipping and a higher local operating cost for retailers. this card will likely be around the $900 mark.
God I hope you’re right. I can’t spend $1200 on a card. No way. Not happening.
Isn’t that just a Nvidia GTX1080 drinking a V
Well If the Founders Edition is $1199, I’m happy to wait for the non founders edition being somewhere between $1000-$1150. About what I expected and happy to pay. Depending on importing costs that is.
Yes, with todays (20/05/2016) exchange rate the calculation SHOULD put the GTX 1080 Founders Edition in Australia at –
$699 USD — $966 AUD
Add GST — $97 AUD
Retail Card Cost — $1063 AUD and AT MOST $1099 AUD
Anything higher equates to Australian Retailers Price Gouging
You forgot to add the cost of shipping the card from the factory over a giant ocean. And the cost added by the fact that we have a sane minimum wage here adding to operation costs for retailers. And the cost added by our higher taxes outside the GST. Suddenly the 18% disparity between conversion+GST and the actual price seems pretty reasonable, huh?
I dislike how much more expensive this kind of stuff is in Australia than in the US, but the reality is that retailers here usually only make a very small profit margin. It’s not their fault.
The tyranny of distance is real.
Shouldn’t it be cheaper to ship from China to Australia than China to America?
Distributors always seem to forget that fact when they talk about cost of shipping to “Far off Australia”
Not necessarily. International shipping is based on economies of scale, more volume means cheaper per unit cost. The United States imported around $42B per month of goods from China last year, Australia imported around $6.5B per month from China in comparison.
There’s also import duties, taxes and tariffs that are different between AU and US that may make us more expensive to import to. That’s an area I have little knowledge in so that may not be the case.
3 display ports?? I assume all new monitors come with these as standard, right?
Otherwise, new monitors too
Adapters tend to be cheaper than new monitors if you don’t have ones that support DP.
The US price is under $1000 AUD, which means it’s not subject to import GST. If this is the price they plan to target here, it will be considerably cheaper to import.
Remember the $1000 limit is the goods cost plus the shipping cost, so it may not squeak in under a grand.
The card is only testing at 12%-30% faster than the 980Ti in modern gaming benchmarks, so I think the pricing is too high unless you are doing VR and can use the new ‘only render the middle in high detail’ mode that boosts performance a lot.
It applies to goods with a declared or assessed value over $1000, which doesn’t include shipping. If the declared value is under $1000, no additional tax is charged. If the declared value is over $1000, then GST is applied to the Value of Taxable Importation (VoTI) which is the declared value plus shipping costs.
In other words, if you buy a AU$990 item with $20 shipping, you will not be charged GST. If you buy a AU$1000 with $20 shipping, you’re charged GST on the combined amount of $1020.
The bigger risk is the currency conversion rate customs decides to use. The rate is determined by Customs and Border Protection as applied on the day of purchase, which is a little nebulous. Best to leave some margin for error.
Got a price from my go to place (popular place, dont want to name) who i have a trade account with… got quoted $1049, and told their base price will be $1099
Are you talking about a store or an importer? One importer I know still doesn’t have pre order prices listed yet.
store definitely not sure about importers costs… been out of touch there for a while
That’s very interesting. Would love to know more, if you want to contact me privately (Twitter DM or email).
So with all the above said, what do you think we can expect to pay here in AUS for the $699US Founders Edition Card. $1100 max ???
Oh and Scorptec only have placeholders listed for $9999 since last night: http://computers.scorptec.com.au/search#w=gtx%201080
I thought you’d made a typo on $999 at first, but nope, that’s actually what they’re listing. Ha.
I was only looking into this card to get a new one under $1000. My 780 sli is fine power wise but constantly runs out of vram in 3440×1440. Would a 980ti be the best bet? I hope much do you guys think they will drop in price post 1080 launch?
I read somewhere that production for 970/980/980ti’s had already stopped and that whatever is left at retail is all there will be. This means that they probably won’t go down in price too much, unless stores/websites want to be rid of them as quick as possible.
I would be more inclined to think that as long as the 980ti is roughly $200 less than the price of a 1080 they will still sell considering the 1080 is about 30% faster than a reference 980ti and more like 15% faster when compared to a factory OC variant.
Mate the Gigabyte Xtreme 980ti is one of the best ti’s for the price its going at for $950 at some stores. I don’t care or believe what people have said or say about the 980ti – especially the Xtreme one i have and boy i get the 200FPS in DOOM just like the 1080 showed off it could, so does mine … and even games like Quantum Break that people whinged had a low Frame rate works flawlessly with that game and have had a literal blast with that. I’m big on graphics in gaming and not into Warcraft type games. I need gorgeous graphics like that of the Crysis series 1 and 2 and 3 on a GTX 950 still looks and runs better than most shooters out there on ULTRA and I have everything i have mentioned running on ULTRA. I have 16gb Kingston RAM – Core i7 6700k – Asus H170 M/B – Corsair 850rmi Mod PSU in a Large Thermaltake case … Everything including Battlefront and Latest tomb Raider all on Ultra and latest Need for speed – everything runs great and no need to rush out to buy a 1080 for me. I can afford one in a month anyway – I’m not fussed with with the price being between $1100 or $1500 – I’ll just buy it. But I will play with my 980ti until there comes a game that needs a 1080 – then I will buy by then the 1180 which will probably be out by the time games would need a 1080 to run them. For now I promise you a Xtreme 980ti is the best card out there for price and power ..Trust me man – You can even see my videos of DOOM on a 4K monitor running in between 150FPS to 200FPS without OC.
Please do link those videos, with Afterburner overlay or equivalent. I love the 980Ti, it’s a great card, but it’s very unlikely you’re running Doom on ultra settings at 4K with 150+ FPS. If you meant at 1080p that’s a little more believable.
I disagree with illucid8’s assessment. The 1080 is optimised around high resolutions and multi-screen rendering. While the benchmarks are relatively close between the highest end 980Ti models and the reference 1080 currently at 1080p, the 1080 pulls away at higher resolutions. 21:9 1440p isn’t a resolution that is typically benchmarked, but for comparison at 16:9 1440p the 1080 benchmarks around 36% higher than the reference 980Ti and around 22% higher than Gigabyte’s Xtreme 980Ti model. The price difference is around 20%, which means you’re looking at marginally better value for performance from the 1080.
That said, GPU performance usually improves over the course of driver updates. The 1080 also has 33% more VRAM and consumes less power. And this is against the reference model. We can expect manufacturers to produce more powerful branded models.
If you don’t mind waiting 8-10 months, you can also stall for the 1080Ti which will have HBM2 and the full-featured GP100 chipset. If previous generations are anything to go by, we can expect another +30% improvement over the 1080, if not more thanks to the architecture change this generation which is only partly realised in the GP104/GDDR5X arrangement.
The short answer is if you’re upgrading in the next two months over 780Ti, the 1080 gives you better performance for cost at current prices. I don’t expect prices on the 980Ti to drop very much considering the Xtreme model is only a few months old right now. If you’re okay with waiting 8-10 months, hold out for the 1080Ti which will leave zero room for debate.
I assume I am fine sticking with a 980 ti for 1440p graphics at the moment.
even my factory oc 290x still smashes (just about) anything at 1440p. only cost me $550 too.
nvidia seriously needs to stop adding a brand premium to their cards.
You can skip every second generation without worrying, that’s been the case with both brands for a while now. The 1080 benchmarks around 25-30% higher than the 980Ti and R9 Fury X across the board which is a decent increase, but unless you plan to run Doom at max settings you’ll be fine for another year or two for sure.
The 980 ti already can run doom on max settings in 1440p.
I think at this stage the only thing that’ll make me consider upgrading is if BF 1 can’t run really well.
From the benchmarks, the 980Ti won’t feed a 144Hz monitor at 1440p on ultra settings and has rate drops below 60. The 1080 won’t hit 144fps either, but it comes much closer (+30%). If you’re running 4K, the 1080 is the only one that sits in the 55+ FPS bracket.
My 1440p only does 60.
It never drops below 60 on DOOM
I haven’t played the game so I can’t accurately describe the location, but there’s a very large indoors area with multiple vertical levels visible, with gangways going all over the place. I’ve heard several reports that the 980Ti drops below 60 during firefights in that area at 1440p/ultra. But I’m not able to test it myself, obviously. If you know the area I’m talking about, are you able to take a look and see how your framerate is there?
Exactly – I have the Gigyabyte Xtreme Gaming GTX 980ti and it runs DOOM between 140FPS to 200FPS on 4K..
And there was that video showing off that the 1080 could do the same.
Putting crap on their own awesome graphics card the 980ti … It’s awesome card and by the time games need a 1080 to run at ultra settings. The 1180 will be out.
Today 22 May i see the price for EVGA Gtx 1080 Founder Edition on pre-order in Europe, and guess what it’s 799 euro without shipping. So this is the real price not what they say!!!
Did Kotaku do their research? http://www.digitalstar.com.au/video-cards.html Take a look at the site it came from and the prices on some of their cards. They vary from reasonable to with a lot of their higher end ‘we’ve added a few hundred to justify charging more than the other stores’. I’d take a lot more stock in one of the reliable retailers than a marked up web store.
Find a bunch of people who want 1080s, fly to America, buy them, fly back, profit (or at least not ripoff?).
Nice idea but you wouldn’t make it through customs without a big fine IMHO.
yep, agreed
So, I got an email from a retailer stating that the maximum expected price for the GTX 1080 Founders Edition will be $1,000 to $1,100. Apparently, I heard they will be buying the Founders Editions for the $599 MSRP then marking up the price here in Australia.
Of course the retailer said this can all change… So we’ll see
I want to upgrade from my GTX480 for gaming and movies (some in 3D) either to my 1920 x1080 120hz Alienware OptX AW2310 monitor, my 1920 x 1080 @ 60 Hz LCD Samsung tv and a BENQ TH682ST 1920×1080 short throw projector I’m looking at buying.
How long until we get an aftermarket GTX1080 from EVGA (my preferred brand) with their cooling (double fans preferred) available in Australia?
Should I consider getting a EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti FTW ACX 2.0+ 6GB or EVGA GeForce GTX TITAN X Superclocked if their prices drop considerably over the next few months, instead of a GTX1080?
I don’t plan on using 4K resolution or care about VR buy I do need a good card especially for Nvidia 3D Vision (or 3D TV Play) which renders the image twice simultaneously so as to create a stereoscopic 3D effect in 1920 x 1080 resolution with settings (textures, anti-aliasing etc) at ultra/maximum.
So maybe I don’t really need the GTX1080 and I could get a 980 or Titan card sooner for less?