Comino Offers Pre-orders for AI Workstations with Unannounced RTX 5090 GPUs, Priced Over $52,000

Company takes pre-orders for AI workstations with eight RTX 5090 GPUs, priced over $52,000

In brief: We're still at least six weeks away from the launch of the RTX 5090, a card that Nvidia has yet to confirm exists, but one company is already accepting pre-orders for a system packing six or eight of these GPUs. If you want to secure a priority slot for the AI server, just hand over around $10,500. Lithuanian system integrator Comino is jumping the gun when it comes to offering Nvidia's next consumer flagship card. German publication Hardwareluxx discovered that the company is offering up to eight of them in the Grando Server, an AI workstation that also comes with a 32-core AMD Epyc processor, 256GB of RAM, and 1TB of NVMe storage. Putting six to eight RTX 5090 cards into a single server is going to create plenty of heat, which is why the system uses a liquid cooling setup to keep temperatures under control. Not surprisingly, the cost of all that hardware is substantial. A system with six RTX 5090s is about 40,000 euros, or $42,213. Increasing the number of cards to eight pushes the price to 50,000 euros, or $52,767. Hardwareluxx registered its interest in one of the systems with Comino. It was informed that due to the high number of pre-orders, the company recommends paying a deposit to secure priority, reserve a position on the waiting list, and receive the system as soon as possible following the official release of the RTX 5090. Comino suggested that a deposit of at least 10,000 euros, about $10,500, was required. The more money put down, the higher the position on the pre-order list, which should result in a quicker delivery of the system. There's no doubt this all seems a little sketchy - it's hard to imagine Nvidia would be too pleased. It's likely that Comino is trying to capitalize on the demand for hardware used in AI applications, especially as the Blackwell B100 and B200 GPUs are sold out for the next 12 months. It's not just Nvidia's products that are appearing on retail sites before they've been announced. Intel's Arc B580 graphics card briefly appeared on Amazon this week, ahead of the expected launch of the Battlemage cards this December.

System integrator offers pre-orders for $52,500 AI workstation powered by up to eight RTX 5090s

Comino is pre-selling the RTX 5090 GPU even before Nvidia has officially launched it. Lithuanian system integrator Comino has started accepting pre-orders for its Grando Server that's supposedly powered by six or eight Nvidia RTX 5090s. The AI workstation starts at €40,000 (approximately $42,000) for the base model with six GPUs and could go as high as €50,000 or around $52,500 for the model with two extra GPUs. According to German outlet Hardwareluxx, Comino recommended that it pay a minimum of €10,000 (about $10,500) deposit to secure a priority slot on the waiting list "due to the high number of pre-orders". Furthermore, the higher the deposit, the earlier you'll get the RTX 5090-powered AI-server. Since Nvidia is yet to launch the RTX 50 series, we don't have any details yet about the specifications of the RTX 5090. As for the rest of the system, the Grando Server has a 32-core AMD EPYC processor, 256GB of RAM, and 1TB of NVMe storage. The server also features water cooling for the GPUs, which enables Comino to pack six to eight GPUs into the system. The Grando Server may seem expensive, especially if we compare it with the $40,000 tinybox pro that has eight RTX 4090s, but the use of next-generation Blackwell GPUs, as well as the incorporation of liquid cooling will significantly push the price of the device. The RTX 50-series is Nvidia's highly anticipated next-generation GPU, with many expecting Jensen Huang to debut the top-end models at CES 2025. Since the graphics cards aren't officially launched yet, add-in board partners and other system integrators haven't made any ecommerce posting yet, with the exception of Comino. Even ASRock (or Amazon) took down the product page for the unreleased Intel Arc B580 when it presumably went live by accident. So, this move by the Lithuanian company is highly questionable and they might even be put on notice by Nvidia for trying to steal their thunder. Despite this, the company might be willing to take the risk to get a leg up among its competitors. After all, there is high demand for these high-powered GPUs due to the AI rush, and analysts even say that Nvidia's B100 and B200 GPUs are sold out for the next 12 months. Because of this, Comino might have thought that it could capture the hardware demand from those who need an AI GPU but couldn't get their hands on enterprise-grade AI accelerators.

How much will the RTX 5090 cost? This $50K server gives clues

A quote for a massive industrial AI server with six or eight unannounced RTX 5090 cards has me doing some napkin math. The buzz around the web is that Nvidia's next-gen graphics cards will be coming sometime in early 2025. We don't know how much they'll cost, but "a whole helluva lot" seems like a safe bet. And apparently that'll be true even if you're buying them in a massive industrial server, which is the first place where we've seen a price attached. More specifically, we've seen it in Europe, courtesy of German site HardwareLuxx (via VideoCardz.com). After announcing new AI-focused servers packed to the gills with RTX 5090 graphics cards, system integrator Comino invited prospective buyers to pre-order. HardwareLuxx asked for prices, and Comino just... gave it to them. How nice. What isn't nice is the price, even if you break it down into individual components. Alright, enough stalling. The price for a server running a bank of eight RTX 5090 cards is estimated at 50,000 euro (approximately $52,700 USD). A six-card version of the server will be 40,000 euro. That works out to $6,500 or so per card for the "best" deal. Before we go any further, you should consider a few things. One, Nvidia hasn't officially confirmed anything about the RTX 5000 series, so all of this is speculative at best (and very weird for an apparent Nvidia partner to divulge). Second, business-to-business prices for servers aren't going to be any kind of indication of final retail prices for cards being sold directly to consumers. The prices we're looking at are for hugely complex infrastructure hardware including the full machine (with "big iron" processors like AMD's Threadripper Pro series) and just as important, the service and support that goes with them. If you can believe it, the quoted price for this setup is actually really good, at least compared to what little public info is available on comparable systems. Comino doesn't list prices for most of its current machines, but occasionally specialist media gets its hands on one of them just for kicks. Here's a WePC review of a Grando server with four RTX 3090 cards with an approximate price given as $28,000. At the time it was written just over a year ago, an RTX 3090 card was going for a little over $1,000 at retail. For a four-card machine, $7,000 per card, that's a scale of seven to one. Let's gather another data point just for kicks. Here's a Comino server with four RTX 4090 cards (among lots of other high-end components!) that you can buy for just $34,569 right now. The RTX 4090 is sold out pretty much everywhere at the moment, but let's assume you can find a listing and someone willing to sell you one -- you'll pay about $1,800. Using the same total price to single card math, you get a ratio of 4.8 to one. A much better deal, on paper. Let's average out those two data points and assume a six to one ratio. So the estimated price of the server, divided by the number of cards, divided by six, gives us an approximate retail price. For the 8-card Grando server it would be 1,040 euro or $1,100. For the six-card server that figure would be 1,100 euro, $1,160 US. There's about a zero percent chance that a new RTX 5090 will cost anything in the ballpark of $1,000 at retail, whenever it arrives. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised to see it go for $2,500 or more. See what I mean about these numbers being meaningless for consumers? Either Comino is getting an amazing deal on these new servers, or it's giving a pretty huge under-estimation of their final price... or there's another factor that I'm missing in all this hardware stuff. Which seems much more likely, to be frank. If Comino charges separately for its custom water-cooled installation, for example, the price would almost double, and even out my napkin math.