On September 17, 2020, NVIDIA launched the highly anticipated GeForce RTX 3080, but they weren't prepared for the overwhelming response it received. In fact, this was their best GPU launch ever while also being the most frustrating.
What happened?
According to their latest blog post, the unprecedented demand for the GeForce RTX 3080 caused crashes and delays on their website. The traffic on launch day even exceeded Black Friday levels for some of their retail partners.
Aside from high traffic volume, their site was invaded by bots and opportunists looking to resell the GPUs, which made it extremely difficult for many PC gamers to place their order.
Faulty initial cards
The problem for Nvidia didn’t stop there. Many people lucky enough to get their orders in before the shortage are now stuck with faulty GPUs. It turns out that many early users are now reporting crashes or severe graphic artifacts. From some early reports and research, it seems some versions of the 3080s are using cheaper capacitors that are failing. This is also happening when these cards are running at a GPU clock speed over 2.0GHz.
Our Thoughts
We think the GeForce RTX 3080 is a huge leap forward from the previous generation performance-wise. What makes it even more appealing is the price point. If you're lucky enough to find it in stock, the starting price is $699.00. A quick search on eBay shows some of these cards selling over six figures - crazy! The fact that some of these cards are having issues isn’t that surprising for us since we’ve witnessed this in their prior product launch of the RTX 2080
We expect to get our shipments of the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 GPUs in the coming weeks and we’ll put them through some rigorous testing to see how they fair.
For now, we recommend renting them from us to see how they will perform without getting stuck with a faulty first gen. card. Speaking with our distributors, it seems that these GPUs will be in high demand with shortages through the end of the year. Please let us know what you think of the GeForce RTX 3XXX series GPUs and its epic launch in the comments down below.
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