A mixed bag for me. My original plan was to get an FE if possible and a Palit Gamerock or Inno3D X3 if not. Why the Palit? The price is usually close to the FE and I've had decent experience with Palits in the past. Plus, of course, their availability around launch tends to be good. Inno3D is because the 4090 I got from them was a genuinely excellent card.Well, for some fun, 4 months later, how did everyone's original plan for a 5090 work out?
Tidying my Desktop tonight and found a word doc the 'master plan' of choices for the 31st July launch, oh how that worked out. Choices (as if) plus prices I must have got from somewhere, maybe speculative tbf and for more some 'fun':
Asus Tuf (non oc) : £2500/€2985/$3112
Oc Tuf. : £2580/€3081/$3211
Asus Astral oc. : £2700/€3224/$3360
Asus Astral LC. : £2880/€3439/$3584
Msi Suprim soc. : £2600/€3105/$3236
My planned 1st choice was a budget of £2,500 for Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5090 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce 32GB (wasn't even available at launch as it turned out) and the backup was the Asus TUF plus a block for under £2,500.
Of course, never went to plan, but I'm now settled with a quiet Waterforce, for £100 over my original budget, which I think worked out well in the end?
I obviously missed an FE and, for the first time since i started buying launch-day with the 1080Ti, I didn't get a launch day card. Inno3D were completely no-show to begin with, but I did get a pre-order for a Gamerock at £2150 from the barcode place, starting at position 37.
By mid-March, I was still at position 21 in the queue and there were no signs of significant movement. A friend ended up with two 5090s - got a Gamerock for £2400 from the cubic place the day before the barcode place shipped his Astral. I bought the Gamerock off him (unopened) at cost. £2400 was obviously more than I'd wanted to pay, but by that point I just needed to get out of stock-checker hell.