I’ve become oddly paranoid that mine is going to die and I won’t be able to find a (reasonably priced) replacement. And two year old RX 590s are selling on eBay right now for more than I paid for mine. Never imagined that one day video cards would be an appreciating asset.
For lower end GPUs? They're ridiculously expensive, but if a card was $100 originally and you have to pay 200% the cost due to shortages, it hurts but it's still doable.
Like others have said, it's too bad that you already have a rig, because now is a great time to buy prebuilt PCs. The '/r/buildapcsales' subreddit usually has people sharing the link whenever a decently specced prebuilt PC goes on sale.
The next day I saw I could get an HP Omen which was much more maxed out (including physical space) - including a 10 core processor, 64GB of RAM, etc and a 3090 with 24GB RAM for about the same price.
I feel shameful for having to purchase a pre-built machine, but it was the only way I could get one since my contact at NVIDIA left the company. On the bright side, if I don’t like the machine, I can resell just the GPU and recoup almost the entire costs.
Unsurprisingly, you can no longer order either machine.
Damn, you're right - I couldn't believe that but it seems to be correct:
- Some random (but available) PC that has an RTX 3080 included: CHF 2802.- (Switzerland, shop I usually use, all their HP Omen with RTX seem to be sold out so I could not use that as reference) ( https://www.digitec.ch/en/s1/product/captiva-g25ag-amd-ryzen... )
- RTX 3080 on Amazon.de: EUR 2699.- ( https://www.amazon.de/Gigabyte-GeForce-Grafikkarte-GV-N3080G... )
Incredible times... .
I still didn't like doing it. It's the first pre-built desktop that I've bought ever. And the first one I've owned since middle school. But I was sick of waiting and wouldn't pay a scalper.
From a timing perspective, I got totally lucky. I happened to be there twice in one day, and just got lucky that he had dissembled the machine a few minutes before I walked in (he was still putting it together with updated parts when I was at the counter). Prior to that, I had looked everywhere for weeks (it was supposed to be for Christmas!) without any luck.
Patience and luck in my case. And the Micro Center has earned me as a loyal customer.
Yeah there are ways to get cards, and I'm not gonna fault anyone for interacting with the laws of supply and demand, but it seems a bit disingenuous to heap praise and declare loyalty to MicroCenter for this. A scalper 5 minutes ahead of you would have been given the same "deal" and that card would have been on ebay within the hour and mining ETH inside of a week, just like the rest of that store's inventory.
There might be a few, and there might be more gaming, but seriously? If I was a miner and could get RTX 3xxx at 100-150% MSRP, I'd be buying them non-stop.
A 3070 at MSRP pays for itself via mining in, what, 10 weeks? And the risk of it being worth less than MSRP any time soon seems tiny.
I’m not going to argue this point for obvious reasons, but short of the work that say, LLTstore is doing, what should MicroCenter be doing?
You’ve got a valid point, which is probably why all of us gamers are so pissed off - we’re all helpless. It’s so insane that I’m actually considering trying to find a 3080, and then selling his Ti. It would take a bit of work, but if I could find one, it would be worth it, and we might have an extra year of life out of a more powerful GPU.
I'm not suggesting MicroCenter should be doing anything other than moving product. If they can mark it up and still sell it, I can't fault them for it. They don't owe me anything. At the same time I don't think it's right to praise them for it which is what my reply was criticizing; they didn't do anyone any favors here.
But they often do loss-leaders on popular things to get folks in the store, so...
I've heard of lines in the morning at other Microcenters but don't know much about the one next to me.
It's cool though that microcenter is doing the opposite of other vendors and doing an in store only thing for cards.
Anyway, if you are reading this and want to buy a GPU from a retailer you have to attack on all surfaces. Scalpers likely write their own bots and spend money to have many accounts running at once (to avoid ban limits from IP and account spam detection). The higher that GPUs are valued (due to scarcity and economic value of mining), the more they will spend and the less likely you will ever get a card.
The first thing you need to do is to make accounts on all AIB sites (such as EVGA or Zotac) then enter their queue for GPUs. They sell some of their cards to people on a FIFO basis and the queue is several months long, but this is the most reliable way to get a GPU in the next two years.
The next thing you need to do is to join a few discords and follow a few twitter accounts (such as stockdrops). Keep your bestbuy, newegg, and amazon sign-ins warm on the device you will be monitoring (likely your phone).
The final thing you can do is run your own open source bot. I only know of fairgame [0]. It's limited to amazon (not a great place to look currently) and you can only check one listing every 3-5 seconds to avoid a ban. I made an account to do this and ran it for a few weeks (with no hits in the MSRP ranges). You can check out the cheat sheet (linked in the readme [1]) to see a decent list of card listings.
0. https://github.com/Hari-Nagarajan/fairgame
1. https://docs.google.com/document/d/14kZ0SNC97DFVRStnrdsJ8xbQ...