Nvidia’s most expensive Blackwell card gets massive price cut but it is not the RTX 5090

Online tech retailers worldwide have started offering Nvidia’s flagship professional graphics card, the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition, for preorder for as little as USD 7,673, far below PC Connection’s USD 8,435, a not-so-insignificant discount of 9%.

B2B specialists Tech-America and Directdial (presumably sharing the same database) have posted listings for Nvidia’s most expensive video card ever launched.

The less powerful but more frugal RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Max Q Workstation Edition is also available for the same price. Both models are sold in retail packaging at a slight premium.

PC Connection (and Mac Connection) entries have been removed for now but Provantage, ITCreations, Exxact Corporation in the US and Indes, ITSupplies, Gegeka in Europe have pages up for the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition, some with pricing, some without.

Fresh RTX Pro stocks available soon?

Nvidia debuted three versions of the Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 video card last week at its annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California.

The server version is unlikely to ever go on sale, as it will almost certainly only be sold as part of a server system.

The Max-Q iteration delivers 10% less performance with a reduction of 50% in the power consumption, making it ideal for systems where multiple cards will be deployed.

With up to 4000 AI TOPS performance, the plain vanilla RTX Pro 6000 BWE is the most powerful Nvidia GPU ever launched.

It has twice the memory size (and power consumption) of its former performance champion, the RTX 6000 and 3x that of RTX 5090, the best GPU on the consumer market.

Other than Nvidia, PNY, Leadtek and Elsa are the other graphics card manufacturers that will stock the RTX Pro series.

Nvidia RTX Pro shaping out to be a bargain?

At the time of writing, there’s a price difference of about USD1,100 between the current flagship and the former one, the RTX 6000 Ada Generation, but there’s more to it than just pricing.

I managed to track down another four RTX Pro cards, including the unannounced RTX Pro 2000 with 8GB of GDDR7 memory and a 115W TDP.

On paper, this is the only card that seems to have regressed compared to the previous generation as it has half the memory of its predecessor, the RTX 2000 Ada Generation.

For the other three (4000, 4500, 5000), I reserve my judgment, but on paper, it looks quite promising.

The RTX Pro 4000 has the same amount of memory as the one step up from the previous generation (RTX 4500 AG), has a 33% lower power consumption, and a much higher CUDA core count and memory bandwidth.

Given that the RTX 4500 AG costs $2,139 and the RTX Pro 4000 costs $1,407, there’s no obvious reason to choose the former over the latter.

Compared to the RTX 5000 AG, the RTX Pro 4500 has a much lower power consumption (20%) and a much higher memory bandwidth but also fewer CUDA cores.

However, these are 4th-generation ones, and I expect both cards to have broadly similar performance.

In terms of pricing, the RTX Pro 4500 costs USD 2,268, while the RTX 5000 AG retails for USD 3,742, 65% more expensive, making it very hard to justify buying the latter.

There’s a similar pattern between the RTX Pro 5000 and the RTX 6000 AG when it comes to CUDA cores, memory bandwidth, and amount.

However, their TDP (300W) is the same, while the RTX 6000 AG is about 62% more expensive than the RTX Pro 5000.

Curiously, Nvidia hasn’t disclosed the performance metrics (Floating-point performance single precision and FP4 AI TOPS with sparsity) for these four cards for obscure reasons.

That prevents us from making head-to-head comparisons, which may leave stocks in the channel unsold and cause retailers a lot of headaches.

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