Monday, October 12th 2020
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080/3090 Founders Edition Sales Limited to BestBuy in the US
The supply of NVIDIA's newly announced GeForce RTX Ampere lineup has been quite controversial since the beginning. Demand for the new GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 GPUs has been rather high and NVIDIA experienced big "demand issues" as the CEO Jensen Huang says. The company didn't expect such high demand and thus hasn't stocked up the chips for that many orders. NVIDIA's AIBs have also seen this problem with GPU demand, as it is too high in ratio to supply. As more chips are manufactured, we can expect this problem only to settle down over time. Today, we got an interesting piece of information regarding the availability of Founders Edition (FE) GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards. NVIDIA has posted on the forums stating the following:
Sources:
NVIDIA, via VideoCardz
Suroosh@NVIDIAWe have heard your feedback regarding the NVIDIA online store and are working to improve the experience.
In the meantime, we will be selling our GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 Founders Edition through other partners. In the US, you can shop for Founders Edition at Best Buy - GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090. In Europe, we continue to review Founders Edition fulfillment options.
Founders Edition units are limited, and more will be available in the coming weeks alongside an increasing supply of boards from our global board partners.
72 Comments on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080/3090 Founders Edition Sales Limited to BestBuy in the US
Partner cards are no better. Majority of online retailers in Poland are running online queues with 1 unit limit per customer. Even then you're still pre-ordering cards that are €100+ over their msrp.
Prices are going up and more and more retailers are increasing prices of 3080 due to the shortage.
Nvidia's conundrum is that they cannot increase the price of 3080 FE and 3090 FE while selling on their own webpage since the RRP is $699 and $1499
SO HOW DO YOU SOLVE THIS!
Simple, you stop selling on your own website and outsource to a BIG retail chain like BestBuy.
Now they can just blame increased cost of distribution and BestBuy can raise the price as they see fit.
WILL BE VERY INTERESTING TO WATCH if BestBuy will keep RRP or raise the price.
If there is and price increase for 3080 FE and 3090 FE you know why they moved the sales to BestBuy.
Their website(if it’s them and where I shop) all the available cards don”t even have attemptec estimate dates just the option to get an alert the same alert every one else got and the fastest fingers win, stock is gone again and the cycle starts over...
Case closed, everything explained. The EU shouldn't demand more than a couple of dozens 3080 in three weeks.
Huang see partner cards climbing in price at retailers all over the world and also cards selling on EBAY like hot cakes at hefty markups.
I think he realized the RRP was to low for 3080, he could have easily set RRP price at $899 and all stock would still been sold out.
Increasing prices on nvidia.com would have been a PR nightmare SO why not do the next best thing and just out source it to BestBuy, increase the prices and let them take the rap for it. I hardly think the greedy bosses at BestBuy would mind or complain as long as they are making lots of extra green.
Lets just see what happens, if prices increase you know i am right. If not, i am wrong and Huang is a golden boy that would never stiff his customers for a few extra bucks.
Now, would I have preferred Amazon + BB + Walmart + Costco + Newegg? Yes. But that hasn't happened.
Even the biggest EU tech retailers (Mindfactory, MediaMarkt) don't have preorder option for 3080/90. Zero hits on "3080" in price on EU's search engines. What a joke of a launch :(