Newegg apparently has a dark sense of humor. On Tuesday, its raffle system for selling PC graphics cards to desperate consumers was offering almost no GPUs. Instead, the system encouraged customers to buy water boilers, air fryers, and a food dehydrator—things every PC builder clearly needs (wink, wink).
The raffle system, dubbed the Newegg Shuffle, normally offers consumer items that are in high demand, including Nvidia’s RTX 3000 cards and AMD’s Radeon 6000 GPUs. But for some reason, the system decided to do the opposite and list dozens of other random, plentiful items.
The items included headphones, antivirus software, a $50 gift card for Uber Eats, Xbox controllers, RAM and SSD storage, monitors, laptops, and smartphones. Among the 77 different products, we only found one GPU, and it was for an $859 RTX 3070 card from Asus.
We reached out to Newegg, and will update the story if we hear back. But we suspect the system glitched. (In the meantime, we entered the raffle for the $50 Uber Eats Gift card, and Newegg’s automated systems sent us an email, confirming our entry for the item.)
Since January, Newegg has been selling the PC graphics cards through the Shuffle event, which ditches the first-come, first-served approach. Instead, consumers are usually given a five-hour window in the morning to enter a lottery to buy the desired PC graphics card on hand. In the afternoon, Newegg then draws winners and notifies them via email that they can purchase the product within a two-hour window.
Due to the ongoing GPU shortage, Newegg’s raffle system has been encountering massive demand. Last month, the retailer told PCMag that, on average, about 100,000 people participate in each Shuffle event. So your chances of scoring a graphics card on a single try are extremely low. I myself won a Shuffle event to buy an Nvidia RTX 3070 card —but only on my 13th try. Still, with persistence, the system can help improve your chances of landing a GPU.
