The cheap 16 GB AI card now costs $805, and the buying surge is unmeasured
The RTX 5060 Ti 16GB rose from $569.99 to $804.99 in Newegg medians, and the Reddit claim that buyers are rushing it rests on one outlet, not sales data.
Vlad Makarovreviewed and published
The cheapest new way to buy 16 GB of VRAM for local inference now costs $805. Median Newegg pricing tracked by Tom's Hardware put the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB at $569.99 in June and $804.99 in August, the steepest rise in the lineup, while the RTX 5070 Ti sat flat at $1,099.99. On 8 November an r/LocalLLaMA post announced users had begun buying the card, in its headline's word, en masse. The pricing data supports a demand story. The thread does not measure one.
What the tracking actually shows
Increases land mid-stack, where the memory is: the 12 GB RTX 5070 rose 36% to $899.99 and the 8 GB RTX 5060 27% to $469.99 over the same two months.
| Card | June median | August median |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 5060 Ti 16GB | $569.99 | $804.99 |
| RTX 5070 | $659.99 | $899.99 |
| RTX 5070 Ti | $1,099.99 | $1,099.99 |
At $804.99 the 16 GB card is still the cheapest VRAM in the tracked lineup, $50.31 per gigabyte, against $66.25 for its own 8 GB sibling and $75 for the 5070. Shortage pricing did not abolish the niche. It made the niche expensive and left buyers crowding the one card that still sells memory cheapest per gigabyte, which is why it took the sharpest increase.
The buying surge is not measured
The post's evidence is one article, linked to en.gamegpu.com, a Russian-language hardware outlet. The poster's one comment is "Oh look, thats us!" An API snapshot put it at 771 points and 423 comments, which measures interest, not units moved: no retail sell-through, no inventory count, no distributor note. Replies carry the skepticism. One dismisses the piece because its "Users" rests on a single source; another objects to "started", since this has been the budget 16 GB option for a while.
The thread does contain first-hand buying. One commenter reports three cards bought months earlier that lifted a main inference rig from 24 GB to 40 GB. Another stacks them because they are "perfect. Blackwell, 100-130W, can be powered with single 8 pin oldschool connector." Plural anecdotes are more than the article offered. They are still not a market.
What that leaves a buyer
Two cards at August's median is $1,610 for 32 GB, the same $50 per gigabyte, with two slots to feed. Its alternatives are a used card "under 500 with a bit of deal hunting," including shucked prebuilt machines, or nothing: one reply prices the whole exercise against a $500 monthly subscription. The same tracking notes AMD's RX 9070 GRE holding near launch price. Until a November report replaces these August medians, that is the evidence, and it argues for waiting rather than for a stampede.
