Like most gamers, I’ve been struggling to get my hands on an Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080. The supply issues continue and the preorders I’ve been lucky enough to nab have been cancelled (by the company) or postponed to next year. There’s been a lot of close calls, but my luck has not been great like many others.
EVGA Email Notice Queue
I had a Nvidia Geforce 970 through EVGA back in the day, but I had to RMA the first one. The replacement worked for years, until I sold it, but I decided to give other companies a try on the next upgrade.
Now EVGA is back in my good graces with their email queue system they have put in place for the 3000 series of Nvidia cards. They record the first time you requested notification for each model of the new cards. When they restock, they notify the next person in line and give them 8 hrs to purchase before the line moves along.
This is great for the people that used this option on launch day, but they are still only up to the late morning of launch day for most of the Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 queues. That’s after weeks of restocks and I’m 5 days out from that, so my chances of getting one this year from this queue are slim to none..
Dell’s Phantom Sale
I thought I lucked out by ordering a MSI Ventus 3080 an hour after I saw a reddit post about them being in stock. It said it would ship that next week. Unfortunately, it was too good to be true. They did not actually receive any stock and not to long after, the MSI factory caught fire.
They pushed backed my shipment by a month (which would have been up last week), but that date came and they sent me a notice of another delay into next year. I let that one auto cancel. On the plus side, they did have a pretty high markup on it with no game codes, so maybe I did luck out there, in the end.
Best Buy Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 Drops
On reddit, I saw that a drop had just happened 11 minutes before I looked and was disppointed I missed it. Knowing they had staggered drops before, I kept refreshing their product page and got a few Add to Cart buttons. Problem was they make you wait a bit and then you have to add to cart again.
None of the pages I had open were refreshing for me, so I tried for a 3090 and actually got that into the cart. I just could not justify twice the price for only 15% increase in performance at 1440p (I’ll be with my ultrawide for awhile). Naturally that little delay ended with that going out of stock before I can complete an impulse buy.
That little exercise highlighted the 2nd stage problem with trying to order: actually getting through the cart.
Zotac Store Night Drops
Someone on reddit had mentioned that the Zotac Store resupplies their Nvidia RTX 3080 around 9:30pm EST, so I made sure my account was set and all order info updated. I had no luck there, but got close tonight.
I was able to add one to cart, but got error pages every time I tried to get through cart. Like so many others have run into, it was out of stock by the time I got any further. It was so close I was just about getting to the payment info.
Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 on NowinStock.com
I started using the site to track shipments and the times they seem to happen. This gives me an idea of which days and times the drops seem to happen. It’s possible, according to history on that page, that some drop could happen tomorrow. We will see if history repeats itself or if the drops are slowing down.
Nvidia RTX 3080 Scalpers on Ebay
Despite the Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080 supply issues, cards are not completely unavailable, of course, that is if you are willing to pay 2 to 3 times more than retail. I’ll admit I’ve looked to see that some cards are selling for less than twice the price now, but it’s the principle of not rewarding scalpers.
It is depressing to see how many cards there are on there that people are not even using. Some of us want it to play. Now we will see what tomorrow brings, good luck to anyone else hunting.