Waiting for the Nvidia RTX 3080 cards

[Martin Blank]

They're released. But that doesn't mean you can have them.

Oh, no.

No, even if you get up early to get things out of the way so you can be there at launch, it will sell out faster than BlizzCon. Because bots. Bots that everyone except Nvidia knew would be there. No CAPTCHAs at launch. Their solution? Change the page every so often to throw off the bots.

And then when it allegedly restocks, they're gone. --POOF-- And then Best Buy restocks, and you can put the card in your cart, but you can't actually buy them because hey, on checking, there are no cards left, but we're going to keep showing them in stock. Newegg isn't much better.

A handful have gotten them. They've shown them off. These are the lucky few.

And so we wait. Because someday, they say, they'll be available.

Someday.

[Doc Giggles]

They have been canceling orders from bots as fast as they can, but the bots keep coming. I get the feeling that until the reselling market has it's fill, they will be forced to phone ordering to get these out to people.

[Seannery]

Fəckiŋ robots. It's like the only way to beat 'em is become 'em.

[Deacon]

Are they going to actually be significantly better than the 1080 this time around?

[Doc Giggles]

Reports are coming in on them now. Seems that there is an issue with some of them having cheap capacitors. It causes a power problem when the card is running at full clock speed. If they didn't cheap out and used the more expensive ones, you get a good card. Waiting for the second run may have turned out to be the best thing and the scalpers got a load of cards that will need a firmware flash to lower the clock speed limit. Sucks to be them.

You can get the full story here https://youtu.be/x6bUUEEe-X8

[raptor9k]

I've never seen the point in buying a latest gen card. They rarely stack up as advertised, frequently have issues, and the prices drop quickly enough I can wait 6-9 months and get it at half the cost.

Granted I'm too cheap to pay $60 for new games so most of the stuff I play is 3-5 years old at this rate but my $180 RX 580 so far has no trouble playing everything at 1440 high or max settings.

[Martin Blank]

So, on the capacitors, that issue was fixed with a driver update. Depending on whom you believe, it took about a 1% performance hit to address.

I have a 1070, so I'm effectively 2.5 generations out of date. I also rely on Nvidia's CUDA architecture for password cracking. I'm waiting.

[Seir]

Two years later we're still waiting. Anyone have an opinion on the proposed legislation that would make the scalper bots illegal?

[raptor9k]

I'm in favor of legislation barring unethical manipulation of the market in general but I doubt it will ever happen. At this point, even the manufacturers are doing their best to prevent lower prices so I think the GPU crisis is here to stay.

I'm still rocking the above mentioned RX 580 and would be willing to pay retail for a 3080/RX 6800 XT but everything is currently sitting at 4x that. At this point the only way to get a semi reasonably priced GPU is to buy a prebuilt machine from system builders like NZXT.

I'm a little surprised none of these companies have designed a mining specific model with no video outputs.

[Deacon]

I’m helping my 13 year old nephew build his first computer. He wants to learn how and to play Minecraft and such. He’s on a paltry budget, but he doesn’t know that he’s getting pretty much all the missing major components for Christmas from different family members (mobo, CPU, RAM, m.2 nVME SSD). He’s got some old Nvidia card I can’t remember which in the mid tower he inherited from his grandfather in a computer that’s nonfunctional for some unknown reason, and in attempting to fix it he’s already got a decent PSU.

I put the list together and got him the CPU. I got a Ryzen 7 5700G (Cezanne, Zen 3) with the integrated Radeon Vega (8, I think). It’s got it’s downsides versus the various X versions, but it was available, and it’s probably going to be a long time till he can afford a discrete GPU anyway. So I figure that’s about as good an option as he’s going to get for a while and should do him just fine for at least a year or two.

[NorthernComfort]

I'm still using an Nvidia 970 I got 5+ years ago. Apparently I really missed my upgrade window! I don't have much need for it beyond curiosity so I'm content to wait 5 more years or for a new PC rig, which is probably the same timeline.

[Seir]

I guess I can consider my older nVidia 670 dying out when it did to be a moment of serendipity due to the fact that I ended up replacing it with a 1070 just right before the market on GPU when on it's crazy price hiking spree. Iirc I only had to pay $250 for a 6gb 1070

[Mav]

Haha peasants, behold my 3080 TI.

[Martin Blank]

Bite it, Mav. I didn't say anything, but I've had my 3080 since November 2020. I played Cyberpunk 2077 entirely on awesome video, hitting all achievements, cars migrating through K-barriers and all.

[raptor9k]

My grandmother passed and left me $1k. EVGA 3080 TI arrives Monday.