Nvidia 3000 Series Tonight

[AnotherGuy]

I setup PartAlert on Discord about a month ago and noted that if I'd wanted to pay the prices, I could have got pretty much any card over that period - but it would have been at a >30% inflated price. I wasn't that desperate nor did I want to pay the money.

I was very lucky today, I was sat at my desk when Discord started pinging at 09:10 this morning and I managed to snag a 3060Ti Founders Edition from Scan for the RRP of £369. Just got the final email today (they send 4 emails, order/payment/picked/dispatched) to say its been dispatched - arriving tomorrow.

Overjoyed - now going shopping for the rest of the stuff to make a new PC.

[Lucas Ayde]

AnotherGuy said:

I setup PartAlert on Discord about a month ago and noted that if I'd wanted to pay the prices, I could have got pretty much any card over that period - but it would have been at a >30% inflated price. I wasn't that desperate nor did I want to pay the money.

I was very lucky today, I was sat at my desk when Discord started pinging at 09:10 this morning and I managed to snag a 3060Ti Founders Edition from Scan for the RRP of £369. Just got the final email today (they send 4 emails, order/payment/picked/dispatched) to say its been dispatched - arriving tomorrow.

Overjoyed - now going shopping for the rest of the stuff to make a new PC.

Not so sure about being able to get any card .... I decided to set up alerts around the same time as you and was following everything that came available in the UK very closely. Pretty much all the AIB ones at regular vendors were going instantly, even the ones priced over and above the AIB's RRP (which are already typically quite a bit above NVidia FE pricing). The only way to definitely get a card was to pay about double RRP and up on eBay. That's just not a starter.

Glad you got an FE card though. I could feel the phone pinging away (I had alerts on Twitter, Discord and Telegram on multiple groups) so I knew something was up. Too bad I was in the one place where I couldn't even use my phone to give it a crack. 35 mins later and I'd have been sat at my PC, why did they release them so bloody early......

By the way, can recommend Discord and Telegram as the best way to get alerts - Discord most of all. Maybe it's just my phone but the Twitter alerts were consistently 1-2 mins behind the Discord and Telegram alerts from PartAlert. Discord is best as they have separate groups for each of the cards ... with the Twitter feed you get all cards including AMD and for all of Europe. You can also pick up some interesting info from the groups, like the Spreadsheet of UK Nvidia FE drops.

[AnotherGuy]

Lucas Ayde said:

Not so sure about being able to get any card .... I decided to set up alerts around the same time as you and was following everything that came available in the UK very closely.

Make sure you follow the @EU (not just @UK) alert.

Most of Amazon will ship across the EU (including UK), so for example a 30xxx that appears on Amazon.de will usually ship to the UK no problem. Amazon.es less likely and Amazon.fr is 50/50 etc. But as you have noted, there are inflated prices. For example 2 Zotax RTX3060 were available at 17:09 today on Amazon.de at 503.99 EU.

[jimmyjimjim]

Newegg in the US have been running a lottery scheme; you sign up and chose what you want to be entered for, then they notify you if you've 'won' the chance to buy it.

I'm on my second attempt. I'll be curious to see what/when I'm successful, and for what.

There's usually some graphics card, along with g.card and mobo bundles, some CPU's, etc.

[Camelot1971]

CCL have some RTX 2060's in stock for delivery tomorrow - £449.99. Given the current state of the market, that's a sensible price. I just ordered one and sold my RTX 3090, which was complete overkill for my gaming needs.

[Lucas Ayde]

jimmyjimjim said:

Newegg in the US have been running a lottery scheme; you sign up and chose what you want to be entered for, then they notify you if you've 'won' the chance to buy it.

I'm on my second attempt. I'll be curious to see what/when I'm successful, and for what.

There's usually some graphics card, along with g.card and mobo bundles, some CPU's, etc.

That's probably the 'fairest' sales strategy when something is massively in demand to the extent that the latest GPUs are. Open an entry window for say half an hour for people to make orders in, do some anti-bot checks on them (probably easier to check when you have access to all the collated orders instead of in real time) then select the 'winners' and offer them the chance to buy by sending them an email. If they don't buy within a short time window, select more 'winners' and give them the offer to buy.

Let's face it, even if you are monitoring alerts it's still generally a crapshoot. eg. All the Amazon alerts I I look at are gone within the time it takes to click the alert link and try to add to your basket. Might as well make it officially a lottery and give people a decently long window of entry so they aren't frantically hovering over their phone all day.

[FourWheelDrift]

People are so desperate for GPUs they have lost the ability to read. - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MSI-GeForce-RTX-2060-Su...

Couldn't be more clearer that it's only the box.

[leglessAlex]

FourWheelDrift said:

People are so desperate for GPUs they have lost the ability to read. - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MSI-GeForce-RTX-2060-Su...

Couldn't be more clear that it's only the box.

I actually feel a little sorry for the seller on that one. It might be cynical, but if it isn't, they're going to have a very angry buyer kicking off, which is never nice to deal with.

[FourWheelDrift]

There are always plenty of empty boxes being sold for around £25 on Ebay, useful if you didn't get one with a prebuild and you want to sell it after upgrading, putting it the right box adds value. Also more protection when posting.

[anxious_ant]

leglessAlex said:

FourWheelDrift said:

People are so desperate for GPUs they have lost the ability to read. - https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MSI-GeForce-RTX-2060-Su...

Couldn't be more clear that it's only the box.

I actually feel a little sorry for the seller on that one. It might be cynical, but if it isn't, they're going to have a very angry buyer kicking off, which is never nice to deal with.

To be fair to the seller the word box is both in the title and content. Shocking that it started from pennies now up to hundreds of pounds, must be bots bidding.

[mmm-five]

anxious_ant said:

To be fair to the seller the word box is both in the title and content. Shocking that it started from pennies now up to hundreds of pounds, must be bots bidding.

It is, and the description makes this doubly clear.

However, a lot of ebay sellers put lots of crap in the title to game the search bots, so you end up with thousands of results for BMW M5 items that don't actually fit, as the seller has just put M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M6 M8 in the title to get more views.

[FourWheelDrift]

Boxes of 3080 Ti cards spotted in the wild - https://www.eteknix.com/msi-rtx-3080-ti-graphics-c...

[FourWheelDrift]

There's some really stty insider crap going on.

72x RTX 3060 Ti models selling for $81,300.00 on Ebay (5th March) just 8 days after the card launched.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/72x-EVGA-GeForce-RTX-3060...

How the hell can one person get 72 cards of the same model barely a week after launch.

[jimmyjimjim]

Six dozen. I wonder how they're shipped.......

[captain_cynic]

FourWheelDrift said:

There's some really stty insider crap going on.

72x RTX 3060 Ti models selling for $81,300.00 on Ebay (5th March) just 8 days after the card launched.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/72x-EVGA-GeForce-RTX-3060...

How the hell can one person get 72 cards of the same model barely a week after launch.

I thought it was common knowledge that the stores, if not the distributors as well were the scalpers.

[Lucas Ayde]

captain_cynic said:

I thought it was common knowledge that the stores, if not the distributors as well were the scalpers.

With massive margins to be made by arbitraging the difference between RRPs and open market prices (ie. what you can flog them for on ebay), you can bet that there will be gouging going on everywhere in the system.

I think the distributors are probably where a lot of it happens, with entire batches of cards going to miners instead of retailers. Probably more than a few people in the retailers bagging cards for themselves (to resell) or their mates too.

On top of that, when stuff does go on sale (online) you have bots jumping in there and hoovering them up for scalpers or miners. Not a whole lot of opportunity for the general public to get hold of one, outside of things like direct sales from AMD and Nvidia and they are few and far between.

[LimaDelta]

Two things. Why don't Nvidia just produce more? and I'm seriously considering an Alienware Aurora R12 rather than a custom build as they claim to be able to ship within 7 business days and have the full-fat 3090. Does anyone know if they are any good as an 'off-the-shelf' package?

[HM-2]

LimaDelta said:

Two things. Why don't Nvidia just produce more? and I'm seriously considering an Alienware Aurora R12 rather than a custom build as they claim to be able to ship within 7 business days and have the full-fat 3090. Does anyone know if they are any good as an 'off-the-shelf' package?

One of the tech YouTubers reviewed them, I think they were pretty good IIRC if a bit loud.

One thing to be careful of is that, if the earlier Dell/Alienware stuff is anything to go by, they don't use FE or partner cards but have their own versions of the Reference PCB cards with their own design of cooler on them. Usually these coolers are absolutely ste and will run hotter and be significantly louder than an FE or partner card; judging from the numbers that turn up on eBay as spares or repair with cooler issues I also think they're much less reliable.

[captain_cynic]

LimaDelta said:

Two things. Why don't Nvidia just produce more?

The microprocessor shortage that is going on. Due to covid and water shortages in major manufacturing hubs like Taiwan.

[LimaDelta]

HM-2 said:

One of the tech YouTubers reviewed them, I think they were pretty good IIRC if a bit loud.

One thing to be careful of is that, if the earlier Dell/Alienware stuff is anything to go by, they don't use FE or partner cards but have their own versions of the Reference PCB cards with their own design of cooler on them. Usually these coolers are absolutely ste and will run hotter and be significantly louder than an FE or partner card; judging from the numbers that turn up on eBay as spares or repair with cooler issues I also think they're much less reliable.

The fan noise doesn't bother me, but the reliability issues do. They are claiming better cooling with the latest model however. I am used to throttling as my 1070 equipped Aorus laptop has no less than four external fans 'helping' keep the temperatures in check. Surely they can't be any worse than that?