How scalpers, a pandemic, and a cryptocurrency boom formed a perfect storm that continues to make PC building an exercise in futility.
(Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition) Want to build a PC with the most up-to-date parts? Good luck. The industry has been grappling with a component shortage for years, but the problem was laid bare in 2020 as the pandemic delayed shipments just as people retreated to home offices and started shopping for the gear they needed to keep their businesses afloat. Then, as new GPUs hit the market, scalpers—some of whom were trying to make ends meet after having lost jobs during the pandemic—used bots to scoop up the sought-after cards and sell them at inflated prices. Others turned to GPU-intensive cryptocurrency mining. Chipmakers and retailers have taken steps to fight the scalpers and crypto miners, but execs still predict the supply will remain tight into 2022. Here’s how we got here. Pre-COVID Years in the making: As our sister site ExtremeTech explains, pre-2020 GPU shortages trace back in the near term to limited yields on 16nm GPUs in 2016 and cryptocurrency-related demand in 2017 and 2018. (Mining setup in your mom’s basement, anyone?) At the same time, Intel was dealing with a slightly more complicated CPU shortage. February 2020 Nvidia gets spooked: As COVID-19 cripples the global supply chain, Nvidia lowers its revenue projections for Q1 2020 by $100 million. Turns out, it didn’t have much to worry about, but more on that later. March 2020 Image: Zoom The pandemic goes global. Shortly after the World Health Organization officially declares COVID-19 a pandemic, cities lock down, borders close, and millions are laid off. Major retailers swap indoor shopping for curbside pickup, and those who have money to spend turn to online shopping, overloading sites like Amazon, where ship dates for PC parts quickly slip to late April. Everyone needs a PC. The Zoom life begins, and for many people, sharing one family computer no longer does the trick. Chromebook and tablet sales boom, and we kick off what will become the biggest year for PC demand in a decade, putting added pressure on chip makers. August 2020 Xe HPG, anyone? Intel announces it will compete with AMD and Nvidia by releasing its first discrete graphics cards for PC gaming in 2021. September 2020 Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition The GPU-apocalypse begins. Nvidia launches the first of its next-generation graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 3000 series. The RTX 3080 Founders’ Edition earns our Editors’ Choice award as the new king of 4K gaming and the next great step in GPU evolution. But even if you have $699 to spare, this GPU is hard to come by. RTX 3090? Also impossible to buy. A week after the 3080 launches, the RTX 3090 graphics card faces similar supply issues. Scheduled to hit Nvidia’s website at 6 a.m. PST, the 3090 is almost immediately listed as out of stock. October 2020 Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition Enter the scalpers. With most of these GPU sales happening online, scalpers quickly crash the party, tapping into bots that can snap up available inventory before the average person has time to click « add to cart. » We speak to people selling access to their bots for a couple hundred bucks. Many buyers are tech-savvy but out-of-work people looking to make a few bucks. One such buyer claims to have scored 42 GeForce RTX 3080 cards in seconds. Later, we rent our own bot, and find it underwhelming. Best Buy steps in. With the bot situation out of control, and cards winding up on eBay at massively inflated prices, Nvidia stops selling the RTX 3080 and 3090 Founders Edition graphics cards via its online store, and shifts sales to Best Buy in the US. Nvidia: Yep, things are bad. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warns that RTX 3000 cards will be hard to buy for the rest of the year, citing the massive demand, which he compares to other popular product launches, including Windows 95. RTX 3080 20GB and RTX 3070 16GB tabled. As of October, Nvidia was selling (in theory) a GeForce RTX 3080 with 10GB of GDDR6X memory, and taking pre-orders for the RTX 3070 with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. It was also planning to release a 20GB RTX 3080 and a 16GB RTX 3070 in December. Facing continued supply constraints, Nvidia opts to delay those launches. RTX 3070 saves the day? Only in our hearts. Nvidia’s RTX 3070 went on sale in late October, but the card immediately went out of stock across major retailers, leaving consumers—including us—annoyed, but not surprised.
