Micro Center Lowballs RTX 4090 Owner With Pitiful $699 Trade-In Offer

Micro Center is a fascinating computer store with often incredible stock of the most rare enthusiast computer hardware. Along with all items needed for a PC, the retailer also sell a variety of GPUs ranging from NVIDIA’s latest to AMD, and Intel. It’s also known for serving up enticing deals that sometimes beat the best prices you can find online, with the caveat being that you need to pick the item up in-store.

Not everything is cheap, naturally. To that end, NVIDIA’s premium-priced GeForce RTX 4090 often reaches close to $2,000 at Micro Center (as well as around the web). If you’d like to trade in your existing GeForce RTX 4090 to take a way some of the sticker shock that comes from playing in flagship territory, however, you may be in for another type of shock. According to Wccftech, Micro Center is offering only $699.95 trade-in value for this pricey GPU. 

This would put it closer to the value of the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, a last generation GPU that is not near the level of the GeForce RTX 4090. Trade-in values are often known to be quite a bit lower than consumers will get by selling the product themselves—you’re trading some value for the convenience of not having to deal with flaky buyers—but this is surely a very sizable chunk off the retail cost. 

Source: Mr. Biggie Smallz via WCCFTech

The GeForce RTX 4090 still easily sells for near its $1,599 MSRP for most models, even when in used condition. Second hand market prices on eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and others, all have it going for close amounts to where it originally launched at. This would put it at a large deficit if sold for only $700, which is hundreds of dollars less than its existing value as a used item. While the GeForce RTX 40 Super series of GPUs have seen some minor cost adjustments, they still remain fairly pricey.

This is likely more a deterrent for users to not trade-in their valuable GPU, as Micro Center still has a healthy stock of new products on its display shelves in most locations. The GeForce RTX 4090 has been one of the most popular NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs of the recent generation, owing deeply to its virtuosic performance across all games. It also has been deemed highly desired by AI and data center outfits, thanks to its speedy 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM. 

While the next generation NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series is not here yet, prices should still remain reasonable for the flagship GeForce RTX 4090. We’d likely only see prices approach the $700 mark in a few years time, but certainly not within the scope of this current generation. 

Word to the wise: as much as we like Micro Center, you may want to think twice about trading in a GeForce RTX 4090 to the retailer if these kind of low ball offers are the norm.