The start of sales of the new GeForce RTX 3080 video cards, which took place on September 17, turned into a real torment for buyers around the world. The Founders Edition was sold out in the official NVIDIA online store in seconds. And to purchase custom options, some shoppers had to stand at offline retail stores for several hours, like some new iPhone. But in any case there weren’t enough cards for everyone.
As indicated by Western media, GeForce RTX 3080 video cards in any version have been sold out in a matter of hours since their release 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 bought all the video cards for subsequent resale at double the price on electronic platforms like eBay.
Some real buyers who still managed to purchase cards in local stores note that they had foreseen such a rush against the background of the lack of pre-orders. That is why some began to wait for the first arrivals of goods in stores the night before the start of official sales. Some Twitter users report that they have stood at the point of sale for more than 12 hours in order to accurately complete a purchase.
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NVIDIA acknowledged the problem with bots and promised to do “Everything humanly possible” up to checking each order manually. On the Reddit forum, an NVIDIA representative announced that the company will try to return the GeForce RTX 3080 to the market next week, however, he did not vouch for the partners. In addition, the company is considering adding captchas to its official website so that bots do not buy cards.
“I cannot be responsible for our partners, but we will receive more cards next week. Customers who have previously signed up for a card-on-sale notification but have not been able to place an order on it will receive emails when a new card arrives in the store. “– said the representative, speaking of the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition.
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In Russia, the situation turned out to be very 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, options from partners at retail have still been received. At least on paper, since video cards are still not available in any Russian store. Users who watch the GeForce RTX 3080 in online stores complain that they cannot make a purchase. That small number of video cards, which nevertheless appeared in stores, were instantly sold out, and then surfaced on the Avito electronic platform, of course, already with “extra charges”, the size of which depends on the greed of a particular speculator.
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Moreover, they sell not only cards, but also the right for their purchase. For example, the Palit GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming Pro version, the price of which in the store is set at 67 thousand rubles, is offered on Avito for 73 thousand. At the same time, the seller demands 2,000 rubles in reserve and promises to redeem the cards in the store and transfer them to the new owner only next week. He justifies the markup by the fact that the cards will no longer appear in stores within the next three weeks.
One of the Russian federal retailers, CSN, openly admitted that it could not cope with the demand for video cards. There was an extremely limited quantity in stock GeForce RTX 3080which were instantly sold out. The store explained the situation by the high demand for the new product all over the world, as well as by the extremely small volume of shipment of video cards to the Russian market: “We apologize for the fact that due to the limited availability of goods (several dozen copies), we could not provide everyone with new video cards.».
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According to the official announcement, the store expects 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 right now is to subscribe to notifications of goods on sale.
At the same time, CSN promised not to raise prices for cards, despite the rush demand. “Don’t worry that you missed the first wave. We do not plan to raise prices for these goods unless the dollar exchange rate changes.“, – said in the statement of the store.
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