6 ms·

Where do you even get video cards right now? I’ve become oddly paranoid that mine is going to die and I won’t be able to find a (reasonably priced) replacement

by tmm 6y ago

Where do you even get video cards right now? 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.

MR4D 6y ago
I bought my son a used 3060 Ti at the beginning of February from Micro Center for $512 + tax. It had been in their display machine before that, and never out of the store. 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.
- ganoushoreilly 6y ago
  I really wish I had a micro center near me. I miss them. I also miss the Frys of (late 90's early 2000's). It's cool though that microcenter is doing the opposite of other vendors and doing an in store only thing for cards.
- rchowe 6y ago
  I wish MicroCenter would work on their customer experience. I go to one in Cambridge, MA to buy IoT supplies and it's never organized (despite signs saying "this area stocked by XYZ"), popular products are behind the service counter and not even in the main area (so you have to ask) and associates rush to stick their associate ID barcode on your merchandise and usually at check out another associate takes it off and puts theirs on. Perverse incentives for sales staff and poor customer experience. But they often do loss-leaders on popular things to get folks in the store, so...
  - akhilcacharya 6y ago
    Wait, has the Cambridge Microcenter had 3080s recently? When do they restock? I've heard of lines in the morning at other Microcenters but don't know much about the one next to me.
- gorkish 6y ago
  *Patience and luck and a willingness to pay way over MSRP for a display model 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.
  - egeozcan 6y ago
    Linus from Linus Tech Tips said that he has insider information that the problems weren't caused by miners at all, it's just that more people are working from home and need new hardware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A4yk-P5ukY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A4yk-P5ukY
    - jaynetics 6y ago
      Very few people need a GPU for work. 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.
      - egeozcan 6y ago
        TL;DW: GPUs are competing for chip production capacity of 2 producers, who seem to be already in stress because of generally increased demand caused by the current situation, so they can't handle demand even a tick above the previously reserved capacities.
      - raarts 6y ago
        I'm a teacher streaming from home. There's more of us.
    - MR4D 6y ago
      Great suggestion! I watched it a few hours ago. Fantastic episode, and I highly recommend anyone interested in GPUs watch it!
robrtsql 6y ago
Buying high-end GPUs? Basically don't bother. You can sign up for the Newegg shuffle which happens at least once a week and hope you get picked to buy an RTX 3070 but even those are pretty expensive. People often brag about how they subscribe to notification bots which tell them when Best Buy gets restocked, but for every buyer who got lucky, there were hundreds of people who dropped what they were doing just to be told that the card is now out-of-stock and has been removed from their shopping cart. 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.
pridkett 6y ago
I had to resort to...gasp...ordering a pre-built system. I first ordered a Razer Tomahawk - which is a NUC coupled with a 3080 Founders Edition. It was about $3300. 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.
- wccrawford 6y ago
  I did the same, but with a 3070. I was going to buy all new parts anyhow, and this saved me a lot of hassle, so it was worth the extra money IMO. 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.
- zepearl 6y ago
  > On the bright side, if I don’t like the machine, I can resell just the GPU and recoup almost the entire costs. 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-9-5900x-32gb-2000gb-4tb-ssd-hdd-pc-14756235?tagIds=615&supplier=406802 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-N3080GAMING-OC-10GD/dp/B08HLZXHZY/ref=sr_1_2?__mk_de_DE=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&dchild=1&keywords=nVidia+RTX+3080&qid=1616611138&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.de/Gigabyte-GeForce-Grafikkarte-GV-N3080G... ) Incredible times... .
- omgwtfbbq 6y ago
  Did the same, was on a pre-order waitlist for a 3080 for months before I cracked. But all priced out it was only like $500 more for the prebuilt vs buying all the components myself. Which considering the markup on 3080s on ebay seems like a bargain.
Cullinet 6y ago
you buy them in workstations through your account manager with your friendly tier 1 vendor. ouch I really ought to be doing something to provide something beneficial from 3 decades of corporate purchasing but just slinging this out there skips the pro salesman v pro salesman level of attention required tho it isn't rocket science but neither is rocket science... like the vram upgrade I genuinely badly want to wave my arms in the air shouting "come here I'll fund the smt assembly automation " edit the rest is in my profile now since unreadable in line but details what I still want to do and will if the opportunity to set up shop for people to do like the article with dedicated facilities
gnopgnip 6y ago
In the bay area, Central Computers. They have 3070 in stock for system builds, and recently they have had 3060 3070 and 3090 in stock for standalone purchases. Microcenter and other brick and mortar electronics stores across the country are similar.
- aaronscott 6y ago
  Just seconding this. They have had stock fairly regularly, and they have a pretty good notification email for when they will have new items available. I purchased a 3090 from them, along with a few other parts.
- a_t48 6y ago
  Caveats: in my experience the Central Computers guys are kind of dicks. I've had a couple of bad experiences with them before. They also have something like a 10% surcharge over "MSRP" for video cards. OTOH - they actually have stock, nobody else does. Go for it.
willis936 6y ago
I had a friend sell me a NIB 3070 this past week for $850. I think he bought it for $750. MSRP of the founders edition (FE) is $500, but MSRP of all add-in board (AIB) partner cards are $600 to $900. Most US retailers are marking up 20+% above MSRP when they do have them in stock then scalpers use bots to pick them up and resell them on amazon and ebay for 2-3x MSRP. Considering I am using my card to mine ethereum (so the card pays for itself) and gaming otherwise, I think I did okay for myself even though I paid well above what would be considered reasonable pricing in a normal year. 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 https://github.com/Hari-Nagarajan/fairgame 1. https://docs.google.com/document/d/14kZ0SNC97DFVRStnrdsJ8xbQO1m42v7svy93kUdtX48/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/14kZ0SNC97DFVRStnrdsJ8xbQ...
yoz-y 6y ago
I was mainly refreshing the pages of as many vendors I’ve found and overpaid. I wonder if Steam, GOG and Epic could somehow pool and make a “gamer certificate” to skip ahead of scalpers and miners. Nvidia seems to try to brick the drivers of the 3060 to discourage mining but I suppose it’s not that hard to work around.
- PartiallyTyped 6y ago
  The Linus Media Group (LinusTechTips etc) is attempting to do something just like this.
  - yoz-y 6y ago
    Interesting, do you have a link or a name of the initiative to search for?
    - PartiallyTyped 6y ago
      I have this, the latest update they gave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30Uvspk0czw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30Uvspk0czw
      - yoz-y 6y ago
        Thanks! I hope there will be more endeavors like this.
efrafa 6y ago
I was able to get rtx 3070 last year, but I was refreshing eshop whole day.

by tmm 6y ago

MR4D 6y ago

I bought my son a used 3060 Ti at the beginning of February from Micro Center for $512 + tax. It had been in their display machine before that, and never out of the store. 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.

ganoushoreilly 6y ago
I really wish I had a micro center near me. I miss them. I also miss the Frys of (late 90's early 2000's). It's cool though that microcenter is doing the opposite of other vendors and doing an in store only thing for cards.
rchowe 6y ago
I wish MicroCenter would work on their customer experience. I go to one in Cambridge, MA to buy IoT supplies and it's never organized (despite signs saying "this area stocked by XYZ"), popular products are behind the service counter and not even in the main area (so you have to ask) and associates rush to stick their associate ID barcode on your merchandise and usually at check out another associate takes it off and puts theirs on. Perverse incentives for sales staff and poor customer experience. But they often do loss-leaders on popular things to get folks in the store, so...
- akhilcacharya 6y ago
  Wait, has the Cambridge Microcenter had 3080s recently? When do they restock? I've heard of lines in the morning at other Microcenters but don't know much about the one next to me.
gorkish 6y ago
*Patience and luck and a willingness to pay way over MSRP for a display model 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.
- egeozcan 6y ago
  Linus from Linus Tech Tips said that he has insider information that the problems weren't caused by miners at all, it's just that more people are working from home and need new hardware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A4yk-P5ukY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A4yk-P5ukY
  - jaynetics 6y ago
    Very few people need a GPU for work. 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.
    - egeozcan 6y ago
      TL;DW: GPUs are competing for chip production capacity of 2 producers, who seem to be already in stress because of generally increased demand caused by the current situation, so they can't handle demand even a tick above the previously reserved capacities.
    - raarts 6y ago
      I'm a teacher streaming from home. There's more of us.
  - MR4D 6y ago
    Great suggestion! I watched it a few hours ago. Fantastic episode, and I highly recommend anyone interested in GPUs watch it!

robrtsql 6y ago

Buying high-end GPUs? Basically don't bother. You can sign up for the Newegg shuffle which happens at least once a week and hope you get picked to buy an RTX 3070 but even those are pretty expensive. People often brag about how they subscribe to notification bots which tell them when Best Buy gets restocked, but for every buyer who got lucky, there were hundreds of people who dropped what they were doing just to be told that the card is now out-of-stock and has been removed from their shopping cart. 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.

pridkett 6y ago

I had to resort to...gasp...ordering a pre-built system. I first ordered a Razer Tomahawk - which is a NUC coupled with a 3080 Founders Edition. It was about $3300. 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.

wccrawford 6y ago
I did the same, but with a 3070. I was going to buy all new parts anyhow, and this saved me a lot of hassle, so it was worth the extra money IMO. 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.
zepearl 6y ago
> On the bright side, if I don’t like the machine, I can resell just the GPU and recoup almost the entire costs. 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-9-5900x-32gb-2000gb-4tb-ssd-hdd-pc-14756235?tagIds=615&supplier=406802 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-N3080GAMING-OC-10GD/dp/B08HLZXHZY/ref=sr_1_2?__mk_de_DE=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&dchild=1&keywords=nVidia+RTX+3080&qid=1616611138&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.de/Gigabyte-GeForce-Grafikkarte-GV-N3080G... ) Incredible times... .
omgwtfbbq 6y ago
Did the same, was on a pre-order waitlist for a 3080 for months before I cracked. But all priced out it was only like $500 more for the prebuilt vs buying all the components myself. Which considering the markup on 3080s on ebay seems like a bargain.

Cullinet 6y ago

you buy them in workstations through your account manager with your friendly tier 1 vendor. ouch I really ought to be doing something to provide something beneficial from 3 decades of corporate purchasing but just slinging this out there skips the pro salesman v pro salesman level of attention required tho it isn't rocket science but neither is rocket science... like the vram upgrade I genuinely badly want to wave my arms in the air shouting "come here I'll fund the smt assembly automation " edit the rest is in my profile now since unreadable in line but details what I still want to do and will if the opportunity to set up shop for people to do like the article with dedicated facilities

gnopgnip 6y ago

In the bay area, Central Computers. They have 3070 in stock for system builds, and recently they have had 3060 3070 and 3090 in stock for standalone purchases. Microcenter and other brick and mortar electronics stores across the country are similar.

aaronscott 6y ago
Just seconding this. They have had stock fairly regularly, and they have a pretty good notification email for when they will have new items available. I purchased a 3090 from them, along with a few other parts.
a_t48 6y ago
Caveats: in my experience the Central Computers guys are kind of dicks. I've had a couple of bad experiences with them before. They also have something like a 10% surcharge over "MSRP" for video cards. OTOH - they actually have stock, nobody else does. Go for it.

willis936 6y ago

I had a friend sell me a NIB 3070 this past week for $850. I think he bought it for $750. MSRP of the founders edition (FE) is $500, but MSRP of all add-in board (AIB) partner cards are $600 to $900. Most US retailers are marking up 20+% above MSRP when they do have them in stock then scalpers use bots to pick them up and resell them on amazon and ebay for 2-3x MSRP. Considering I am using my card to mine ethereum (so the card pays for itself) and gaming otherwise, I think I did okay for myself even though I paid well above what would be considered reasonable pricing in a normal year. 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 https://github.com/Hari-Nagarajan/fairgame 1. https://docs.google.com/document/d/14kZ0SNC97DFVRStnrdsJ8xbQO1m42v7svy93kUdtX48/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/14kZ0SNC97DFVRStnrdsJ8xbQ...

yoz-y 6y ago

I was mainly refreshing the pages of as many vendors I’ve found and overpaid. I wonder if Steam, GOG and Epic could somehow pool and make a “gamer certificate” to skip ahead of scalpers and miners. Nvidia seems to try to brick the drivers of the 3060 to discourage mining but I suppose it’s not that hard to work around.

PartiallyTyped 6y ago
The Linus Media Group (LinusTechTips etc) is attempting to do something just like this.
- yoz-y 6y ago
  Interesting, do you have a link or a name of the initiative to search for?
  - PartiallyTyped 6y ago
    I have this, the latest update they gave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30Uvspk0czw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30Uvspk0czw
    - yoz-y 6y ago
      Thanks! I hope there will be more endeavors like this.

efrafa 6y ago

I was able to get rtx 3070 last year, but I was refreshing eshop whole day.