And HDD Prices Are Spiking Too; Yay
Friday should offer a glimmer of hope, some sort of happy news instead of the steady drum of bad things we hear everyday; 2026 disagrees with this tradition. A variety of sources have confirmed ASUS are discontinuing NVIDIA’s RTX 5070 Ti and 5060 Ti 16GB, saying they’ve reached ‘end of life’. This doesn’t reflect NVIDIA’s statement that these models will continue to be produced. One might suspect that the issue is not that these cards are EOL but rather that ASUS would prefer to save that memory for more profitable cards.
The RTX 5070 TI and 5060 TI both use the same 16GB of 28 Gbps GDDR7 which is not quite the same as the 16GB of 30 Gbps GDDR7 found on the RTX 5080 but it’s awfully close and one wonders if we will see slightly tweaked RTX 5080 cards in the future. It might also find its way into the delayed but still expected SUPER versions of the RTX 50xx series. It’s understandable ASUS doesn’t want to admit that, but in the long run they might find that consumers would have very much appreciated the candour.
Sadly, it’s not just flash that is increasing in price. Thanks to an increase in demand for spinning rust we have watched HDD prices jump by about 46% since September of last year. They are still significantly more affordable than SSDs, but manufacturers are obviously taking advantage of the increased demand to improve their profit margin.
Lets hope next week is a little kinder to enthusiasts.
