GeForce RTX 5080
Excellent 4K card with one asterisk: 16GB is half what the card above it gets.
Average in-stock listing $2,336 on Sep 26, 2026 (lowest $1,480), 2.3 times the $999 launch MSRP. See its price history. The links open live listings. Amazon links may earn us a commission.
Will it run your models?
VRAM meterLocal AI fit: up to low-20B class models. Rule of thumb for 4-bit quantized models; context length and other apps eat into the same memory.
Open models that fit comfortably at Q4
- gpt-oss-20b 21B · 11.7 GiB · headroom 2.8 GiB
- DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B 14.8B · 8.3 GiB · headroom 6.2 GiB
- Qwen3 14B 14.8B · 8.3 GiB · headroom 6.2 GiB
- Phi-4 (14B) 14.7B · 8.2 GiB · headroom 6.3 GiB
- Gemma 3 12B IT 12.2B · 6.8 GiB · headroom 7.7 GiB
- Mistral NeMo 12B Instruct (2407) 12.2B · 6.8 GiB · headroom 7.7 GiB
- Qwen3.5 9B 9.65B · 5.4 GiB · headroom 9.1 GiB
- Gemma 2 9B IT 9.24B · 5.2 GiB · headroom 9.3 GiB
Tight but possible: Codestral 22B v0.1, Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct (2506), Gemma 4 26B-A4B IT.
What it costs to run
360W of board power, 4 hours a day under load, priced at the residential electricity rate where you live. Pick a state and the numbers update.
Board power is the rated maximum; real gaming load usually sits below it and idle is a few watts, so treat this as the ceiling. Rates: EIA residential average, May 2026. See every card ranked by running cost →
Why you buy it
- Genuine 4K performance
- 360W is manageable in a normal case
- DLSS multi-frame generation support
Why you hesitate
- 16GB VRAM at $999 is thin
- Poor value for local AI versus used 24GB cards
The editor's take
Strong 4K performance and the sane person's ceiling for a gaming build. The catch is the memory: 16GB is fine for games today but it is the same VRAM as cards costing half as much, so the local AI crowd should look elsewhere. If you catch one near MSRP it is a good buy; above MSRP the 9070 XT argument gets loud.
Decided?
Live listings for the GeForce RTX 5080, straight from the retailers.
Average in-stock listing $2,336 on Sep 26, 2026 (lowest $1,480), 2.3 times the $999 launch MSRP. See its price history. Amazon links may earn us a commission.