Nvidia never sold MSRP direct cards, not for years now, they go through Best Buy in America, only a 14 day return policy with Best Buy as well if anything goes wrong, AMD direct offers 30 day returns...
We can do this all day lad...
They sold by an authorised retailer but Nvidia controls the access to buy the product, so to order you have to click buy on Nvidia's own website for a authorisation link, they also impose restrictions on the retailer to stick to MSRP and prevent people buying more than one card at same address or payment card.
Not sure why you want to pretend Nvidia dont sell at MSRP, but it is what it is, and in the UK they have handled it far better than AMD who have only sold over priced AIB cards here.
You are right though that Nvidia dont handle the full transaction, you have to start the order process through them and they control the retailer's management, but the retailer processes the payment and ships it. so I am not disagreeing with you on that.
From what i remember Nvidia removed direct sales from their website sometime during the boom and even in the US it was handled trough BestBuy. Seeing FE cards in Europe was even more uncommon as time went on. I very much doubt in the results of this poll as FE was never a high volume product.
Check overclockers uk forum, there is the poll, and the FE thread is massive with people posting every time they successfully get a FE card on a FE drop. There is also telegram and discord servers that announce FE card drops in europe. The proportion of FE to AIB seems much better in Europe as the AIB seems to pushing the bulk of their supply to America, e.g. its practically impossible to get an EVGA card here.
Overclocker's itself is a uk retailer, they realised the AIB stock situation was so bad they let the thread continue as well to help people get Ampere cards, so yes FE owners in the UK are quite a big % of gamers.
Nvidia on average have been doing restocks every 2-4 weeks since Ampere started.
There is also a thread on the forum where OCUK retail staff were posting updates about AIB stock deliveries, two of the AIB delivered ZERO for over 3 months.
Granted I do accept the situation is much different in America, now days things are done regionally so can be huge variances.
Thats the screenshot, you guys wont see this as the website checks region of IP accessing it.
The top one is the FE, note it says £649 which is MSRP and out of stock as thats an actual buy link when in stock, whilst the others that say check availability are AIB's sold at third parties like Amazon etc. The order link is randomised on every drop, so you can never get to it direct from the authorised retailer, you have to click buy on Nvidia store page to be forwarded and beat a high level captcha game as well. Us UK peeps have been very grateful for Nvidia's handling of the FE as not only have they honoured the MSRP but also the very strict order process has made it as hard as possible for scalpers.
