Not exactly what one might want but better than nothing. Tomorrow July 20th at 7:30 am local time at select participating stores across the U.S., Best Buy will issue a limited number of tickets to those standing outside in line at 7:30 am and allow the ticketed folks to enter the store at 8:00 am to buy an RTX 30-- card using the ticket as the purchase key. Exactly what card(s) will be available is a mystery (an RTX 3080 Ti is shown on the Best Buy web page). I will be standing in line hoping to get an RTX 3090. Limit one ticket per person and no holding a place in line for any other folks. Hopefully as time goes by Best Buy will make this a regular event while RTX 30-- card supplies are limited to discourage online scalping.
P.S. Maybe Microsoft should give this a try with the Xbox Series X! Oops! No stores, except a few flagship stores worldwideā¦ Well, maybe contact Best Buy then and see if BB can arrange similar events for the Xbox Series X in BB stores. Despite limited availability the Xbox Series X|S had a great June, 2021 sales month: Xbox Just Had a Record Month in the U.S. - Thurrott.com
No one scalper or group of scalpers can show up everywhere, unlike the Internet. So, yes, at a particular store in LA a team of scalpers might show up and get in line at 3 am to buy every card available when the store opens at 8 am. But no one scalper can be at every Best Buy store in the U.S. and it takes more effort for any scalper to make money off this whereas online itās comparatively easy with bots (according to hearsay) to automate purchases. I canāt claim to have instigated Best Buy to do this but a couple weeks ago when visiting their RTX 3090 card page as I have done at least several times a day since I got my G2 back in January, 2021, BB offered me a user survey allowing comments and I gave them a detailed reply telling them how disappointed I was that they were doing so little to circumvent scalping and give everyday folks like me a chance to buy a card. I told them that if Iām unable to purchase a card until the next version of the card comes out in maybe ~a year (the 4090?) Iād really be turned off to buying any such gaming equipment through Best Buy in the future and would start looking elsewhere for future equipment purchases. Iād encourage anyone else also wistfully hoping to get a new card to relay similar feelings to Best Buy via a Tweet, survey reply, or however.
Below my survey reply to Best Buy, actually only submitted to BB on 7/13/21, so unlikely it had anything to do with 7/20/21 sale announced today. But I suggest that any hopeful card buyer submit similar sentiments to BB or your other favorite retailers/distributors. (I guess I was only mentally thinking Iād buy elsewhere in the future - never put to words in my survey reply).
I have been interested in buying an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 card from Best Buy. Itās great that itās potentially available at the original MSRP but discouraging that Best Buy has no way to get in line and no obvious one-to-a-customer-while-in-limited-supply policy. At this rate, Nvidia is going to come out with a newer model before there is any chance of buying the RTX 3090. So I may end up not buying any such card out of frustration.
Didnāt feel that your survey adequately captured what I was looking for, i.e., most powerful Nvidia graphics card for use in PC gaming, especially VR, while also using it for Machine Learning. I wish it were easier get in line at Best Buy to buy such a card and get better info on how long the wait might be.
Newegg.com has been doing a similar thing with their newegg shuffle for a couple of months now. Sign up, choose which of the items youāre interested in and see what happens; itās how I bought my 3080 Ti card. Apparently chances of success arenāt that high but keep on entering for now.
I didnāt fastidiously check the listing order earlier but it appears to be alphabetical already, FIRST, by state, i.e. Alabama to Wyoming. Then within the listings for a state, e.g., TX, the cities are listed in alphabetical order, Arlington first, The Woodlands last for Texas. At least the state order is probably the same order as when I first posted as I found my city in Texas over on the middle far right where it still resides now and I remember Alabama being at the very beginning of the list when I first posted.
The Best Buy web page for the GeForce RTX 3090 has changed, too. It used to say āOnline Purchases Onlyā (and SOLDOUT). Now the page for the 3090 specifically says IN STORE ONLY with the following explanatory text:
In-Store Only Event
Limited quantities available in select stores. Cannot take calls for orders or availability. Ticketing rules apply.
Learn more (refers to the 7/20 Sale link posted above as OP post in thread)
One still doesnāt know whether the specific store that you go to is going to have the 3090 but hereās hoping!
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 24GB GDDR6X PCI Express 4.0 Graphics Card Titanium and Black 9001G1362510000 - Best Buy (note I randomly picked the Dallas, TX, Park Lane Store - I have no idea whether this store is participating in the special 7/20 event and will also have the 3090 card. All the Texas stores that I looked at normally open at 10 am so the special opening at 8 am in the morning across the nation at select stores is indeed a special opening just to sell the Nvidia RTX 30-- cards available to customers who show up early and are lucky enough to grab one of the limited number of sale tickets available).
Amazing that card is so popular, it must be really nice. I wondered if I should get a RTX 3080 TI or RTX 3090. I have a 1080 TI that is water cooled and over clocked so I wonder if I would see any difference or not. I will upgrade my CPU and motherboard and see what happens. Maybe this RTX cards will be easier to get in the future
Besides the chip shortage, the RTX 30-- cards because of their power are particularly used in cryptocurrency mining. Nvidia has tried to discourage this by introducing a hash limiter. I guess because of its price, as of May 18, 2021, the 3090 was the only card without the built-in hash limiter. Nvidia Expands Mining Limiter to RTX 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080 Graphics Cards | PCMag
I imagine there are just some folks who are like the billionaire Hunt brothers who tried to corner the world silver market in 1980, i.e., the scalpers. Hereās hoping that card scalpers suffer the same fate as the Hunt brothers, who eventually went bankrupt and lost almost all of their fortune. Silver Thursday - Wikipedia
There was a recent fall in the value of cryptocurrency as China cracked down on mining in its own country causing the return on mining to fall and putting a lot of used GPU cards into the secondhand market.
From the conclusion of the RTX 3080 Ti vs RTX 3090 comparison at UserBenchmark: "Professional users, such as game developers, that can make use of 24 GB of memory, may find value in the 3090. " Some folks in the MSFS community discussion feel that 12 Gb of VRAM (3080 Ti) just isnāt enough to support an HP Reverb G2 headset fully (almost like supporting TWO 4K monitors). I want to have VRAM to spare ā¦
Iāll just go home sadder but wiser if they donāt have the 3090. Main fear is line will be around block by time I get there. OTH, maybe it will be like when MS offered a free Nokia 1520 to the first 16 people who showed up for an MS Store 12 Days of Xmas Special. I was last in line at #8 when I showed up an hour early but easily managed to get one free under AT&T contract. Hopefully, the 3090 price tag will have almost everyone going for something more affordable!
There is no way I would spend $1500 on a video card, especially just to run a specific game/sim.
Money must grow on trees for those of you spending that much, but its your money.
Hope you find this purchase worth the investment.
Happy flying.
I was at Micro Center recently to purchase a video card. Luckily for me they had the card I wanted āin stockā and I was able to get it. The salesman told me that they get a shipment in at 10 am and by 2 pm all the high end video cards are gone. This has been going on for at least two months. WOW!!!
Iāve always considered scalping to simply be the process of buying something with the intention of immediately selling for profit. Whether itās on a large scale or individually is irrelevant, in which case any number of people taking advantage of Best Buy could be scalpers.
The two ākidsā next to me had driven 50 miles from Kerrville, TX, each hoping to buy 3070 or 3080 cards. A ten year-old in front of me (with his dad) held up his hand for a 3090!
Unfortunately, I didnāt quite show up early enough. I considered going in the middle of the night but was worried about muggers if no one else was around and worried about bathroom facilities before morning.
Altogether, Iād say there were 150 to 200 people in line. The folks 20 to 30 people from the front of the line said that they arrived at 7 pm the day before! I was somewhere near 100 to 150 people back, having only arrived at 6:45 am. BB was way behind schedule and was slowly letting people in in batches. Finally around 8:30 am, after 70 to 100 people had been let in, three big guys in BB blue shirts and a manager all in black came out and announced, āLast card still available. 3090. Hold up your hands!ā About 1 in 10 or so people down the line held up their hands as the biggest BB guy handed out full-page prints of a 3090 card image as a buying ticket. And one of the BB guys was reminding people, āFourteen Ninety Nine!!!ā to make sure people knew what they were holding up their hands for. The 10-year-old kid and his dad in front of me both held up their hands for a 3090! And the big BB guy ran out of 3090 tickets to hand out just as he reached meā¦
Yep! Anyone could be a scalper but regular folks have a better chance competing with them āmano-a-manoā with Best Buyās show-up-in-person policy rather than trying to compete on the Internet with bots who can scan sites and fill out forms faster than any ordinary human can.
Quit telling people about micro center. When everyone else was paying upwards of $500 for an X56 joystick I paid the list price there. It took a month for it to come into stock. But if you tell people about them your just going to make stuff harder to get the next time I need it. ROFL
Far better computer store then Best Buy any day though.
robots/manequin 
