October 2026 GPU Price/Performance Rankings: Prices Rose on 59 of 81 GPUs, and a Resale RTX 5090 Now Costs 2.4x MSRP

Resale Still Beats Retail, and the Gap Grew

Last month I told you to check resale before buying an RTX 50 card new. September made that advice stronger. Here is September best-deal pricing next to what the same card cost new on Amazon in September and August, all from our own data for each calendar month:

New on Amazon rose on all six, and on five of them faster than resale did. The 5070 Ti is the clearest case: up 33% new against 5% used. The 5090 rose 23% either way. Treat the September new column loosely: there were fewer Amazon listings than in August, and the 5060 Ti figure rests on three of them. Amazon also does not tell me a listing's condition, so a used offer sold under a new card's title can land in that column. And none of this includes retail stores. A Micro Center or Best Buy restock at MSRP beats every price in this table, so check them before you pay either column.

Against MSRP the 5090 is now 140% over sticker on resale, up from 95% in August. The chart shows the six largest premiums, so the one card missing is the 5070 at $557, 1% over its $549 MSRP. That makes it the only RTX 50 card still within a few percent of list price.

1440p Gaming Best Bang for Your Buck in October 2026

The RTX 3060 Ti still leads at $1.19/FPS, though it rose 11% and now costs more than it did in July. The next two cards are 8GB as well. The one I would look at is the RX 6800: 16GB for about $95 more, and cheaper than the 12GB RX 7700 XT. The RX 6800 XT is about $50 more again for roughly 19% more frames. Both it and the RX 7800 XT rank above the 6800 on the chart, but only by two or three cents per frame, and the 6800 is the cheapest 16GB gaming card. If you plan to keep the card a couple of years, it is the one I would buy.

4K Gaming Best Bang for Your Buck in October 2026

Same trap as last month, when the 10GB RTX 3080 topped this chart (see the corrections at the end). This month the RX 7600 leads on cost per frame, but it is an 8GB card that only ranks here because Counter-Strike 2 barely touches memory at 4K. Modern AAA games with textures up will not be so kind. The RX 7900 XT is four cents behind it with 20GB, and 37% below its original MSRP. If you are buying for 4K, that is still where I would put the money.

AI Inference Best Bang for Your Buck in October 2026

The Arc B570 takes the top spot from its sibling at $1.03 per INT8 TOP, with the same Intel catch: far less of the open source AI stack assumes OneAPI than assumes CUDA. Last month's cheap CUDA pick, the RTX 3070, rose 27% and slipped behind the RTX 3080, which has 2GB more memory. The first 16GB card is the RX 9070 XT at $1.67, on ROCm. If your models fit in 10GB, I would buy the 3080.

LLM Training and Fine-Tuning Best Bang for Your Buck in October 2026

The Tesla P100 leads again at $6.9/TFLOP, but it is a 2016 datacenter card with no tensor cores: a cheap experiment, not a training rig. The practical pick is still the RTX 4080, even after a 9% rise. Last month I pointed to the A30 for 24GB. It rose 31%, and the RX 7900 XTX now edges it per TFLOP with the same 24GB. On ROCm, that is the cheaper route. If you need CUDA, the A30 is still the only 24GB card here.

The RTX 3090's 38% Jump Was Mostly One Seller

On the chart the RTX 3090 jumps 38% from August to September. Most of that is August. One seller listed seven HP OEM 3090s for a single day, four of them at $840 to $990, and those set August's best deal. Against the rest of August's listings, September's $1,207 is up about 10%. It is still the 3090's highest best deal in six months, and the RTX 3070 is at its six-month high too. If you want a used 3090, I would not wait for another August: it took one seller clearing stock to make it.

Other Notes

• Corrections to the last two reports. Some of the listings I removed this month were also in July and August, so a few charts on the August and September reports have changed since I wrote them. I wrote last month that the H200 NVL had undercut the H100 PCIe. That rested on one $15,500 listing, sold as new and sealed under a title that said "pair", which I should have caught. Without it the two cost about the same in August, near $27K, and in September the H200 is about $36.3K against $29.2K for the H100. The five cheapest H200 listings in September were all qualification samples (QS in the title), which is worth knowing before you pay datacenter prices for one. I also put the RTX 5090 at 63% over MSRP in August. That rested on two listings I should have caught: a $2,399 Founders Edition from a seller with three feedback, up for one day, and a $3,580 "brand new" card from a seller with one feedback. Without them, August was 95%: the best deal was $3,897 rather than $3,254, up 23% from July rather than 13%, and resale beat new on Amazon by $365 rather than $1,008. That Founders Edition was also listed on July 31, so the August report's $2,873 for the 5090 is $3,173 without it, 59% over MSRP and up 3% from June rather than down 6%.
• Last month's gaming charts changed too. Two August listings with a failed fan or port came out. Without them the RTX 3060 Ti still leads 1440p, at $1.07/FPS rather than $1.05. On 4K the RTX 3070 Ti falls from first to $2.50, behind the RTX 3080 at $2.44 and the RX 7900 XT at $2.47. The 3080 is a 10GB card in the same trap, so the advice stands: the 7900 XT was the 4K card to buy.
• Among former flagships, the deepest discounts are shrinking slowly. Against original MSRP the RTX 3080 Ti is 62% below at $453, the RX 6950 XT is 62% below at $418, and the RX 6900 XT is 60% below at $400. All three rose a little in September, by 5%, 1%, and 2%.