The start of sales of the new GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards, which took place on September 17, turned into a real torment for buyers around the world. The official NVIDIA online store sold out the Founders Edition in seconds. And to purchase non-standard options, some customers had to stand at offline retail stores for several hours, as if for some new iPhone. But in any case, there were not enough cards for everyone.
According to Western media, GeForce RTX 3080 video cards in any version were sold out in a matter of hours from the moment they appeared in more than 50 different retail chains around the world. Later it turned out that there were special bots. With their help, speculators monitored new receipts and for subsequent resale at double the price on electronic sites like the same eBay.
Some real buyers who still managed to purchase cards in local stores note that they foresaw such a rush against the backdrop of a lack of pre-orders. That is why some began to wait for the first receipts of goods in stores the night before the start of official sales. Some Twitter users have reported that they spent more than 12 hours at the outlets to make sure they made a purchase.
NVIDIA acknowledged the problem with the bots and promised to do "everything humanly possible", up to manually checking each order. On the Reddit forum, an NVIDIA representative said that the company would try to return the GeForce RTX 3080 to sale next week, however, he did not vouch for the partners. In addition, the company is considering adding captcha to its official website so that the cards are not bought up by bots.
βI cannot be responsible for our partners, but we will receive more cards next week. Customers who have previously subscribed to the card's availability notification but have not been able to place an order for it will receive emails when a new arrival is available in the store, βsaid the representative, speaking about the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition variant.
In Russia, the situation turned out to be largely similar. Although sales of the reference version of the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition by the Russian office of NVIDIA will begin only on October 6, retail options from partners still arrived. At least on paper, since there are still no video cards in stock in any Russian store. Users who watch the GeForce RTX 3080 in online stores complain that they are unable to make a purchase. That small number of video cards that nevertheless appeared in stores was instantly sold out, and then surfaced on the Avito electronic platform, naturally already with βmarginsβ, the size of which depends on the greed of a particular speculator.
Moreover, they sell not only cards, but also the right to purchase them. For example, the Palit GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming Pro version, the price of which is set at 67 thousand rubles in the store, is offered on Avito for 73 thousand. At the same time, the seller demands 2000 rubles for the reserve and promises to buy the cards in the store and transfer them to the new owner only next week. He justifies the extra charge by the fact that the cards will no longer appear in stores over the next three weeks.
One of the Russian federal retailers, DNS, openly admitted that he could not cope with the demand for video cards. There was an extremely limited number of GeForce RTX 3080s in stock, which were instantly sold out. The store explained the situation by the high demand for the new product all over the world, as well as the extremely small volume of shipment of video cards to the Russian market: βWe apologize for the fact that due to the limited availability of goods (several dozen copies) we were not able to provide everyone with new video cards.β
As stated in the official message, the store is waiting for new arrivals, but the situation with the availability of cards will be able to normalize only by the beginning of November. Therefore, the only option now is to subscribe to notifications about the receipt of goods on sale.
At the same time, the DNS promised not to raise prices for cards, despite the rush demand. βDon't worry that you missed the first wave. We do not plan to raise prices for these items unless the dollar exchange rate changes,β the store said in a statement.
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Source: 3dnews.ru