NVIDIA RTX 4070 GPU price leak makes us fear the worst

NVIDIA's RTX 4070 is rumored to launch later this week, and we've caught a glimpse of some pre-release pricing - and it doesn't make for pleasant reading.

We should make it clear upfront that prices from retailers that appear before a product is launched can often be wrong, and maybe just placeholders (educated guesses), but equally, they can sometimes serve as a fair indication of ballpark price tags.

Sadly, what we've witnessed from a Vietnamese retailer (Bpstore.vn) - as highlighted by I_Leak_VN on Twitter - is on the high side compared to previous leaks.

You can see the prices in the tweet above, although note that the retailer has since taken down the product listings for multiple RTX 4070 models from the likes of ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, and Zotac.

Prices start from 17.9 million Vietnamese dong, or as Tom's Hardware points out, $637 before sales tax, and they go up to $916, which is a pretty eye-watering level. The latter is the ASUS GeForce ROG Strix RTX 4070 OC Edition (ROG Strix cards are top-end models, of course), and the former is a Zotac Trinity model.

Remember, the RTX 4070 is rumored to be coming with a $599 price tag, and the latest leaks on the performance of the next Lovelace GPU also carry that purported price, so it's seeming more and more likely.

The prices we see here are a fair step up, then, but of course we must be cautious around all this - this fresh retailer leak, and indeed previous rumors - so keep your skeptical hat firmly on.

A weak value proposition?

The current worry is that, again going by that recent performance leak - from NVIDIA's presentation materials for the RTX 4070 - what we're getting is a graphics card that offers a 30% improvement in frame rates compared to the RTX 3070. However, the RTX 4070 is also 20% more costly than its predecessor, so the overall generational uplift in terms of performance per dollar looks less than compelling (as we heard from hardware leakers last week).

And that's with the MSRP supposedly pitched at $599. If it ends up being more than that - as this fresh retailer leak hints at - then the value proposition worsens still. Especially for higher-end RTX 4070s with beefier components, although granted, you can overclock those further and get better performance levels that way (or at least enthusiasts will).

Clearly, we don't want to get carried away with the negative speculation here, but it's hard not to with the evidence mounting up that the RTX 4070 could be another disappointment from NVIDIA - certainly in price/performance terms, anyway.

We'll need to wait for reviews of the RTX 4070 to be sure of how this graphics card will pan out, of course - these should be imminent, given the launch date is purportedly April 13 - and further consider additional aspects of Lovelace, such as DLSS 3 (but that's a pretty situational benefit).

The only brighter news we've heard recently is that maybe - just maybe - the RTX 4060 could step in and save the day at the relatively affordable end of the GPU spectrum (keep those fingers very tightly crossed).