Yesterday, we discussed the launch of Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, a powerful and affordable new card that has been lauded as one that’s set to turn the GPU industry upside down and help radically change gaming.
There’s only one issue – getting your hands on one is a herculean task that, despite Nvidia‘s best efforts, just won’t get easier no matter what. After a nightmarish launch of the RTX 3080, the 3070’s launch was barely any better.
Back when the 3080 launched, hopeful enthusiasts found themselves thrown away when bots bought the products away from Nvidia in under two seconds. While the products lasted a bit longer, hopefuls still found themself defeated in their quest to obtain a 3070.
Nvidia delayed this launch, pushing it from October 15th to October 29th, specifically so that they could build up more stock for consumers to buy. Unfortunately, it seems like they weren’t quite able to shore up enough.
While the stock lasted more than the 3080’s did, hopeful enthusiasts still found themselves mostly out of luck – online, at least. While some Micro Center locations were able to put the cards into the hands of enthusiasts in-store, the online format for Best Buy saw much lower success rates.
Immediately at launch, the site began to stutter as countless hopefuls flooded the site, rendering it barely-functional at best. From there, as things continued, things didn’t get much better.
Best Buy was making the stock available a bit at a time, rolling waves out to enthusiasts rather than making it all available right at once. This was meant to make it so that customers had a better chance of getting them, as well as to ease the strain on the site a bit.
Unfortunately, it didn’t do much, nor did their efforts to stop bots and scalpers from snatching up hundreds and hundreds. Within 15 minutes of launch, there were already more than 300 eBay listings of the cards, with bids reaching as high as double the price and still climbing.
As the Best Buy website continued to stutter and crash, some customers were able to get the items into their cart – even into checkout – before the website inexplicably removed them from the carts. Despite being told that getting into checkout with a cart reserved the card, enthusiasts that managed to do so were denied nonetheless.
Overall, it was about as disappointing as the RTX 3080 launch managed to be, even if the cards lasted a bit longer. It seems that the increased stock did next to nothing to alleviate the issues, and most hopefuls are feeling a bit cheated about now.
If nothing else, though, it’s certainly helped shore up interest in the AMD cards coming later in November.
