Tag Archives: GeForce 30 series

Technology

Best Buy Totaltech Subscription Doesn’t Actually Get You a GPU

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Photo: Scott Olson/Getty

In case attempting to buy a graphics card at or near retail prices hasn’t been demoralizing enough, Best Buy is here to kick us while we’re down. The retailer is exploiting the ongoing supply shortage and our resulting desperation to force customers into paying another $200 for a shot at buying a graphics card.

We learned of Best Buy’s antics this week when the retailer made in-high-demand RTX 3000 GPUs available at MSRP…to those subscribed to its “Totaltech” program, a “perk” that costs $199 a year to join. If you didn’t pay up in advance, your admittedly slim odds of nabbing one of these components shrunk to zero.

Taking advantage of customers for something they have no control over is, well, an abhorrent business practice, made worse when some of the people who signed up never got a chance to purchase. Customers voiced their displeasure on Twitter, revealing how the Totaltech program didn’t guarantee them a GPU because Best Buy supposedly delayed their membership activation or sold out of cards (they were gone within four hours) before they made it to the front of the line.

If folks who missed out didn’t already regret their subscription purchase, Best Buy decided to sell the full range of RTX 30 graphics cards today to non-Totaltech customers. The odds of scoring one were much lower, but those who did just saved themselves 200 bucks. Perhaps the biggest atrocity is that Best Buy told its subscription members that it had sold out of GPUs, then decided a day later to make them available to non-members. Oh right, and some of those GPUs, like Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards, are exclusive to Best Buy, so it’s not like you can backlist the retailer and try again elsewhere.

Twitter user @CameronRitz, who tracks the stock of popular products, asked whether those who paid for Totaltech felt cheated. Here is one particularly telling response: “I’ve had total tech for other reasons but if I bought it for yesterday’s drop I’d be pissed. I didn’t stand a chance at getting one, that drop was terrible. Endless verify account loop. Worthless.”

To make matters worse, what might have been an effort to stave off scalpers seems to have only helped them. One scalper claims the paywall assisted them in buying 28 graphics cards, one of each available model: “I bought almost $20,000 in GPUs today,” a user named Bipper claimed in a Discord chat room, PCMag reports.

“I think the fact that it was Totaltech did more to help than anything else. It really limits the number of people that can go after the cards,” Bipper wrote.

Best Buy didn’t respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment when asked if it plans to continue restricting certain products to Totaltech members.

Best Buy’s Totaltech membership comes with “24/7 Geek Squad support,” two-day shipping, and two years of product protection. If there is any reason to sign up for it (assuming you don’t need those other benefits), it’s that paying $200 plus the MSRP of a graphics card could cost less than buying from said scalpers, even if it feels just as grimy.

This isn’t the first time Best Buy has toyed with its customers; it did the same with PS5 and Xbox Series X stock drops, restricting the latest consoles to those who pay up. I’m afraid there are no signs of things getting any better so long as the supply chain is still a mess, so keep joining restock chat rooms, subscribe to supply trackers, and pray for a bit of luck.



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Nvidia RTX PC GPUs Come Down In Price As Bitcoin, Dogecoin Fall

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Image: EVGA / Kotaku

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card you’ve been after to complete your “Extreme Gaming PC” build is still in short supply but finally getting slightly cheaper. That’s thanks to a drop in crypto mining participation as the value of Bitcoin and other blockchain currencies plummet ahead of what some analysts are calling a new “crypto winter.” Sounds bad for the server farms cooking the planet for short-term gains, but good for anyone looking to play Starfield on ultra settings later this year.

As CNBC reported yesterday, Bitcoin and Ethereum are both down nearly 50% from their peaks just a few months ago. Whether you think it’s just a cooling-off period, a long-overdue market correction, or a “death cross” omen of bad days ahead for crypto, the shift is already manifesting as modest price movement in the supply-constrained world of PC gaming.

Tom’s Hardware recently did a quick survey of graphics card reseller prices on eBay, and found that the prices of most popular models have started to come down from their peak a month ago. In a few cases, the prices have even dropped by double digits. A 4.5 percent discount on a RTX 3080 Ti might not sound like a lot, but given how expensive the cards are to begin with it comes out to be nearly $100 cheaper than it was just a month ago. RTX 3080 10GB cards apparently saw an even more impressive drop, dropping from $1,804 down to $1,595.

While Nvidia GPU supplies are supposed to improve in the second half of 2022, Intel said last fall that overall shortages, and thus inflated prices, could continue well into 2023. Outsized demand, meanwhile, has been driven in part by recent booms in the crypto mining market. At the same time GPUs became scarcer during the pandemic, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and other assets reached unprecedented new heights, leading to windfalls for those with the computing capacity to service the blockchain.

But at least on the crypto -side, the tide finally seems to be turning in favor of cheaper graphics cards. Things started moving in that direction last month after Fed Chair Jerome Powell teased interest rate hikes. In addition to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, meme stocks like GameStop and AMC are also crumbling. Hopefully, more affordable PC gaming doesn’t end up coming at the cost of another economic recession.

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Technology

RTX 3090 Owner Finds Old Glove Inside $1500 GPU

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Image: u/antonyjeweet

Imagine this. You’ve just paid a ton for a new RTX 3090 Founders Edition GPU. You plug the card in, boot everything up and … wait, why is my super-expensive GPU running at 230 degrees?

Reddit user antonyjeweet asked themselves that very same question. Given that GPUs shouldn’t be running above195 degrees fahrenheit/90c well, ever, they figured there was something wrong with the internals.

This sort of thing is pretty rare, but it does happen. Igor’s Lab reported earlier this month how a user received an AMD Radeon 6700 XT with all the thermal pads still installed. The thermal pads are basically small bits of plastic or tape that are supposed to be removed before the GPUs are shipped to users.

And after rolling the dice and taking his GPU apart to replace the thermal pads, antonyjeweet discovered an unwelcome surprise: a finger glove, hidden inside the thermal pads:

Image: u/antonyjeweet

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“Now I know why my memory temps easily hit 110c very very fast. Now they stay at 86c max after 1.5 [hours] of stress testing. Also the core dropped 10c (from 75 to +/-65c after stress testing),” they wrote.

Interestingly, Nvidia at first followed procedure. They refused to honour the card’s warranty because antonyjeweet had taken the GPU apart, which is all pretty standard. However, after discovering someone in the Founders Edition assembly chain had left the little plastic surprise behind, they’ve agreed to help out antonyjeweet if they want it.

“Nvidia told me at first I lost my warranty. But after seeing this they said we will give you warranty (got that on mail). No swap or anything. If it works fine just keep it, if not, contact us and we will fix it,” the Netherlands-based user wrote.

If you’re wondering how something like this even happens, the real answer is there’s a global chip shortage. Customers usually don’t care too much the how’s and why’s, only that they get supply of their flash new consoles, CPUs, GPUs and everything else as soon as possible. That pressure and crushing demand often results in crippling conditions for those working on the factory floor. One factory in Vietnam that’s part of the Samsung and Apple supply chain has around 150,000 workers living at the factory full time, while another major Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer forced some migrants back into shared accommodation despite the intensity of that country’s COVID wave.

On the bright side, everything worked out fine in this instance. But it’s a reminder to everyone that luxury consumer tech isn’t always going to work as advertised. If you’re going to drop thousands for real-time ray-tracing and all the bells and whistles at 4K, you might as well spend a little bit extra time making sure it’s running the way it should.

This story originally appeared on Kotaku Australia.

 

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Technology

EVGA To Replace All Those Expensive GPUs Killed By Amazon’s MMO

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Image: EVGA / Kotaku

Earlier this week, folks who were playing the closed beta for New World using a high-end EVGA RTX 3090 GPU began sharing stories that the expensive cards were getting bricked by the game. Now, it’s been confirmed that EVGA, the GPU maker behind the cards that failed, is going to replace all those 3090s ruined by the MMO.

PC Gamer was told directly by EVGA that it is planning to replace every single RTX 3090 card destroyed by New World. A spokesperson told PC Gamer matter of factly that “Yes, all failed 3090’s are being replaced.”

The site also pointed out that YouTuber JayTwoCentz has reported that his contacts at EVGA say the cards should be shipping out already. According to him, the company had a stock of RTX 3090s on hand for replacements.

New World is an MMORPG being developed and published by Amazon. Unlike Amazon’s other attempts at making video games, this one seems to be popular and successful. (It might even survive longer than a year!) Currently, Amazon is running a closed beta of the game. Earlier this week, some unfortunate folks that jumped in to try the game out before its August 31 launch walked away with completely dead EVGA RTX 3090 GPUs. Luckily, well for everyone else, it seems that only EVGA cards were being destroyed by the New World beta.

Shortly after the beta started bricking cards that can cost upwards of $2,000 (or more if bought on the secondary market) Amazon patched the game to fix the issue. I probably don’t have to tell you, but these high-end GPUs can be nearly impossible to find these days, leading to wild crowds and huge prices on sites like eBay.

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After patching the game, Amazon sent a statement to Kotaku that the beta was “safe to play.” I think a bunch of people with dead EVGA cards would probably disagree with that statement.

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Technology

Rare Gundam Graphics Cards Wasted On Crypto Mining

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I can’t explain it. I can’t justify it. But I do get Gundam fans’ strange attachment to the special-edition GeForce RTX 3080 Gundam graphics cards. They’re beefy but elegant and come in a sleek titanium white. They’re also next to impossible to find, which is why some people might be crestfallen to see them put to work anonymously mining crypto currency.

As first reported by VideoCardz, the expensive GPUs were recently spotted at the Nguyenconpc PC shop in Vietnam being packed in cases like sardines, presumably to be resold as custom crypto mining rigs. Announced last year, Asus’ RTX 3080 Gundam cards are pure fan service, with extremely limited quantities pushing them to resale for $2,000-$3,000 on places like eBay. (The most basic RTX 3080 models have an MSRP of $699, though of course you won’t find them for that little these days.)

The Gundam-edition 3080s don’t have special souped-up specs, but these cards are especially attractive to miners since they were created before Nvidia started artificially limited cards’ mining performance. That’s a bummer for the Gundam fans who would love to get their hands on these great-looking GPUs but now probably won’t get the chance.

While pandemic-related supply chain issues and the crypto boom have put a lot of pressure on the graphics card market over the last year, both of those factors are slowly subsiding. Nvidia, for example, has made moves to silo its crypto mining customers from general PC gaming enthusiasts and reduce the effectiveness of mining with its newest cards. Meanwhile, certain crypto currencies, Ethereum ostensibly being one, are set to move to a much less power-intensive mining system later this year.

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While those changes are good for the environment and for people trying to build or upgrade their gaming PCs, it’s probably too late for this current, limited round of Gundam 3080 GPUs. Of course, it’s not like there’s a shortage of white paint and Gundam decals in the world, so hopefully Asus gets the message and decides to bring back the Gundam RTX line in a much more plentiful fashion at some future date.

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Technology

Genshin Impact Devs Awarded PS5s, Graphics Cards Via RNG

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Raffles and gift give-aways aren’t uncommon at company parties, but the company behind Genshin Impact went a step further, randomly awarding hard-to-get graphics cards and PS5s to employees as thanks for helping make one of last year’s hottest new free-to-play gacha games.

“MiHoYo, the developers of Genshin Impact, held their annual employee meeting where they gave away a bunch of electronics to employees in a lottery,” Niko Partners senior data analyst, Daniel Ahmad, wrote on Twitter yesterday. Accompanying photos showed giant stacks of iPhones, Nintendo Switches, GeForce RTX graphics cards, and PlayStation 5s, the latter of which has been especially hard for people to get their hands on following ongoing inventory shortages.

The irony, of course, as PC Gamer pointed out, is that Genshin Impact is itself largely based around lotteries—based on random number generators (RNG)—in which players pay currency earned in-game or real money for a chance to unlock rare new characters. Some are much harder to get than others, leading players to grind and burn through resources waiting for top-tier characters like Venti to drop. Some players have spent loads of money on the game this way, one of the reasons Genshin Impact went on to make nearly $400 million in its first couple of months, according to mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower.

To celebrate the game’s lucrative launch, MiHoYo reportedly used a similar drop-rate system to allocate the limited supply of gaming hardware it planned to give away to employees on top of other bonuses. According to a screenshot shared by Ahmad, staff had a 30% shot at a Nintendo Switch, a 21% shot at an RTX 3070 graphics card, a 16% shot at a PS5, and a 1% chance of getting a combined Apple Watch Series 6 and iPhone 12 Pro Max bundle.

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For the time being, it looks like you’ve got at least as good a chance of scoring a PS5 from getting a job working on Genshin Impact as you do from refreshing your Amazon cart.



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