NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Hits $1,299 on Auction Sites

[Tsing]

Image: NVIDIA



The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 won’t be released until September 17, but scalpers are already trying to extort hardware enthusiasts who are champing at the bit for a flagship Ampere GPU. A cursory glance at eBay shows 26 listings for the heavily hyped card, all of which are going for ridiculous margins ranging from $1,099 to $1,299. That’s nearly twice the MSRP set by NVIDIA ($699). Surprisingly, the markup isn’t as bad for the GeForce RTX 3090, which is being listed for $1,800 ($1,499).



To be clear, these listings are for preorders only, which means that bidders would only be putting down their hard-earned cash for the chance of scoring one. If the scalper sleeps in and fails to get a...

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[Space_Ranger]

And what's more depressing is that those auctions will SELL! Greed... The mother of all evils... (*Waits for the inevitable Free Market comments*)

 

[magoo]

What bothers me the most about this stuff......
there are scalping laws in most states, yeah I know that usually applies to gasoline and groceries in times of hurricaines, yet ebay lets this stuff go on.
Also, you are betting that this guy can beat the system and actually score a GPU from nvidia for $699 and then turn around and sell it to you for twice as much.
Sickening.
And I don't care about "it's their money" and "it's a free market"
It's simply against the law and good conscience.

 

[Riccochet]

What bothers me the most about this stuff......
there are scalping laws in most states, yeah I know that usually applies to gasoline and groceries in times of hurricaines, yet ebay lets this stuff go on.
Also, you are betting that this guy can beat the system and actually score a GPU from nvidia for $699 and then turn around and sell it to you for twice as much.
Sickening.
And I don't care about "it's their money" and "it's a free market"
It's simply against the law and good conscience.

It's not scalping when there is an MSRP involved. Take note of the "S" in MSRP. Same reason car dealerships get away with up charging on popular vehicles. Like Ford dealers do on Shelby Mustang's. They call it a "market adjusted price".

Scalping is raising the price of a fixed price item. Like concert or sport event tickets.

 

[Denpepe]

Scalping is raising the price of a fixed price item. Like concert or sport event tickets.

These are Nvidia cards sold only by nvidia at a fixed price unlike the aib cards.

Anyways for me it is simple I rather buy no card then a scalper one they can suffocate on them for all I care.

Going to be a weird end of year as a lot of the major launches will be dissapointing for a lot of people (Nvidia GPU's, AMD GPU's, PS5 and the new Xboxes look like they will all be in short supply)

 

[Armenius]

That is bad. Unless there are backroom deals going on at retailers there is no way for absolutely anyone to actually have even a preorder made, yet. Anyone who are bidding on these listings are going after literally nothing.

It's not scalping when there is an MSRP involved. Take note of the "S" in MSRP. Same reason car dealerships get away with up charging on popular vehicles. Like Ford dealers do on Shelby Mustang's. They call it a "market adjusted price".

Scalping is raising the price of a fixed price item. Like concert or sport event tickets.

I don't know about sport tickets, but concert tickets have had "on demand" pricing ever since Ticketmaster solidified their monopoly on the market. That does not include tickets being resold by people. Trying to secure tickets for Tool back in February I saw the price of tickets at launch going up in real time on the website.

 

[Brian_B]

That is bad. Unless there are backroom deals going on at retailers there is no way for absolutely anyone to actually have even a preorder made, yet. Anyone who are bidding on these listings are going after literally nothing.

This is exactly what is going on. Someone has a friend that works at BestBuy or Frys or Microcenter. And they can just take an entire pallet off the truck and ring it out to the friend before it hits the shelves. It shows up as a regular sale to the store, so they don't ask questions.

 

[Uvilla]

Been trying to look for some article to post about how some a holes leverage computer and some from of quasi hacking to screw people out of online sales. That is part of the reason people report getting stuff in their carts but not being able to finish the transaction mere minutes in it.
What makes this work, is people paying for it... Its stupid and supports the practice. If they hoarded these items and choked on them, believe me, the practice will die in a second.

 

[Zarathustra]

This only works because undisciplined twats are willing to reward this human trash because they are inpatient.

If we all took a stand, and all refused to ever pay above MSRP for anything, this would end instantly.