If you thought graphics card availability was bad now we could be in for many more months of the same, if not worse -- with supply of GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards remaining tight until at least July 2021 according to the latest reports.
ExtremeTech reports from information at Alternate.NL which is a retailer that sells to Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium. The site reports:
- RTX 3090: Very Small Deliveries (Few Open Customer Orders)
- RTX 3080: very little supply (Very many open customer orders)
- RTX 3070: Small Deliveries (Few Open Sales Orders)
- RTX 3060 Ti: very little supply (Fair amount of open customer orders)
- This means the chance of an RTX 3080, especially for new orders, is virtually nil.
Not only are the GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards impossible to find, but crypto miners are buying them up in gigantic batches, scalpers are getting in and making huge profits, and on top of that the prices are skyrocketing. It's a gigantic perfect storm that ultimately hurts gamers.
Chinese New Year will kick off tomorrow on February 12 and will see factories and most of China's production shutting down for around 2 weeks which will only hurt supply more. Add to this COVID-19 and its various effects on companies and supply chains across the world, the situation seems to (very unfortunately) be getting worse.
We thought things would get better by the end of Q1 2021 (March) but it seems that has changed, with ExtremeTech delivering the bad news: "The once-solid guidance that this situation would resolve itself by the end of Q1 is looking increasingly shady, and we're seeing multiple companies already warning that it might be the end of Q2 2021 before things are resolved".
