Graphics cards are very expensive these days. Hardly news, of course, and the most powerful of these have been ludicrously pricey for quite a few years now. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition has a painful MSRP of $1,999 and other models are considerably more expensive. Enter stage left, the Asus ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 Dhahab OC Edition, replete with a massive cooler, a hefty base overclock, over six grams of gold-plating… oh, and a $7,000 price tag.
We first learned of Asus’ golden goose earlier this year, but there was no word on what the price was going to be. While all of us in the PC Gamer hardware office expected it to be extremely steep, I don’t think any of us were expecting it to be this high.
Actually, it can be more expensive than that, because it depends on what country you buy it in. Asus isn’t selling its monstrous 5090 across the globe, just a select few locations in the Middle East, according to Videocardz, and the cheapest price seems to be around $6,500 or so.
Up until now, the priciest RTX 5090 offered by Asus was its overclocked ROG Astral edition, coming in at $3,360 at Newegg. The Dhahab model is basically twice that figure, which is…. err… something, that’s for sure. So, what exactly are you getting for all that additional money?
Well, you’re getting an RTX 5090 with a hefty base overclock, for starters. Where Nvidia’s FE version offers a boost clock of 2,407 MHz, this massive gold brick of a card defaults to 2,580 MHz and goes up to 2,680 MHz in OC mode. The latter is a clock speed increase of 11% so that’s clearly worth at least $1,000 (I’m not being serious).
Then there’s the four-fan cooler, with its huge heatsink and phase-change thermal pad for the GPU die. I don’t know about you, but to me, that’s got to be another $1,000 there easily (I’m still not being serious).
Finally, there’s the pièce de résistance: the cooler’s shroud and backplate are gold-plated. Not gold paint but actual, real, solid gold. A whole 6.5 grams of it. Now that’s not worth $1,000, as the current spot price for the malleable metal puts it around $670. But does your GPU have solid gold on it? Yeah, I thought not, so that easily makes it worth every cent of a thousand dollars.
So, there you have it—it’s obvious why the ROG Astral Dhahab is over $3,000 more expensive than the common-or-garden ROG Astral.
Okay, let me actually be serious for a moment. Asus could have charged five times what it’s asking for and it would still have no problems selling the Dhahab edition in its intended markets. The fact that it’s ‘just’ an overclocked RTX 5090 doesn’t matter, it’s the fact that it’s highly exclusive and ridiculously bling. Many buyers probably won’t even use it—just the status of having one will be all that matters.
If you just so happen to have $7,000 and you do want to splash out on some PC gaming goodies, can I humbly suggest that you give Asus’ Dhahab card a miss and instead get yourself an entire RTX 5090 gaming PC and a massive OLED gaming monitor for the same amount of money? You’ll have change spare to buy a can of gold spray paint, too, if you feel the urge to make your own Dhahab Lite edition.
