Who knew it could be so hard to get major corporations just to take your money?
Buying a new graphics card has been tough for a while now. And in 2022 it sure isn’t easy, or for the faint of heart or wallet. Fab-capacity shortages for manufacturing cutting-edge silicon are roiling the tech industry. The resulting supply crunch has hit the graphics card world the hardest.
The result? It’s near-impossible for the average person to compete with cryptocurrency miners and scalpers in the race to see who can buy the latest graphics cards the quickest. These days, new cards, sold in limited quantities, sell out in an eyeblink at launch. Soon after, some of those very same cards show up on eBay or Craigslist at multiples of their manufacturer suggested retail prices (MSRPs). Existing cards, meanwhile, go out of stock almost as soon as fresh inventory is posted online or put on retail store shelves.
Sure, there was a run on video cards in 2017-2018, triggered by the first crypto-mining craze. But it has relented, and buying a card before the COVID-19 pandemic began used to be as easy as a leisurely Amazon or Newegg order, or a field trip to your local Best Buy or Micro Center: Enter with a credit card, exit with a video card. No more!
The good news, though, is that it’s not impossible to land the card you want. Some enthusiasts have managed to upgrade their builds with the latest and greatest graphics tech despite these challenges. The bad news: It’s going to require more time than you might expect, a bit more savvy—and maybe even some fast action and sly moves.
Let’s run through our five top suggested strategies for buying a new graphics card in this, the most challenging of times for GPU shoppers, PC gamers, and content creators.
1. Use Restock Notification Tools for Online Storefronts
You can’t buy a graphics card if you don’t know when it’s restocked, and some tools and channels can help you with that. Stock levels are easier to track for digital sellers than it is for brick-and-mortar stores, which we’ll get to in a minute. But actually buying a new GPU using this method will require a fair amount of luck.
Of course, you can park yourself on the product page of a given graphics card at your favorite reseller, and tap the F5 key, all day long, to refresh your browser. But that’s tedious and ineffective. After all, each card appears on a discrete page of a site, and not every seller makes it easy to keep track of, say, all the GeForce RTX 3070-based cards a seller has in its database, all the time. These are some of the easiest ways to keep track of an online retailer’s inventory without manually refreshing a web page until you finally score (or snore).
Discord and Telegram
Perhaps the simplest and lowest-commitment way of monitoring online inventory is to use Discord and Telegram. (For anyone who isn’t in the know: Discord is basically Slack for gamers, and Telegram is a highly automatable messaging service.) Intrepid users of both services have set up a variety of bots and communities dedicated to letting people know when a retailer’s website finally has graphics cards in stock.
This method has a few upsides: It’s mostly passive, it’s free, and it’s totally legitimate. But there are some downsides, too, the most important among them being the fact that every other person who uses these bots or joins these communities will also be looking for a new graphics card. Anyone who’s shopped on Black Friday knows how quickly neighbors can become deadly rivals when the most-desired items are in short supply. (Our reporter Michael Kan, who experimented with bots and tried his level best to buy an AMD Radeon card via conventional retailer-stalking, ultimately came up aces thanks to an alert from the Discord channel Fixitfixitfixit Drops & Tech.)
YouTube and Twitch
The graphics card shortage has given rise to a new category of streamer: the restock monitor. Several channels on YouTube and Twitch have taken to monitoring various websites to see when they receive a new shipment of GPUs. When they do, they play a sound to let people who leave the channels running in the background know it’s time to switch tabs and race other viewers through the checkout process. Game on!
This method is fairly unobtrusive—all you have to do is listen up for the restock chime—but it’s also less effective than using Discord or Telegram. Those services can notify you on any device when a GPU has been restocked; the YouTube and Twitch channels are only useful on the device being used to stream them. Anyone with a metered connection should also be wary of the data that will get consumed to keep streaming these videos around the clock.
Dedicated Inventory Trackers
Of course, you could always turn to ol’ reliable instead of relying on these newfangled bots and servers and streaming channels. That’s right—it’s email’s time to shine.
Services like CamelCamelCamel can automatically email you when a graphics card’s price drops (which is the service’s primary function) or comes back in stock. People have been using these services for years to track items they want to buy online.
Unfortunately, this might be the worst method of trying to nail an in-stock notice on a new GPU. CamelCamelCamel, in particular, is limited to Amazon, where restocked graphics cards sell out almost instantly, and you have to set up alerts for individual products rather than checking for any modern graphics card. Other services, such as HotStock.io and NowInStock.net, might support more storefronts or aggregate multiple versions of a given GPU onto a single page, but the restriction to a specific product is still pretty common.
2. Keep Track of Inventory at Local Retailers
Physical storefronts offer a few advantages over their digital counterparts when it comes to finding a graphics card in stock. The primary one is reduced competition. Everyone can shop on Amazon; not everyone can visit your local Micro Center. (Pro tip: Micro Center, if you live where the chain has stores, is better than most retailers for nailing a GPU in person.) Why compete with cryptocurrency miners, scalpers, bots, and everyone else looking to buy a new graphics card online if you can find the same product on a store shelf?
Here are a few tips for buying a new graphics card at a local electronics store:
- Sometimes, “nice” works. Be polite to the store’s employees. They aren’t responsible for the chip shortage, they don’t decide when graphics cards are restocked, and, in many cases, they are limited in their ability to help people get the products they want. But they’re going to be more likely to use what little wiggle room they have if you’re polite to them, than if you were rude. Exercise the golden rule.
- Call to ask which days of the week certain products are typically restocked. Stores often receive new shipments of a specific kind of device or gear on a predictable schedule. (Or at least as predictable as it can be, amid today’s global supply problems.) Picking up the phone, politely asking when graphics cards are restocked, and planning your visit around that schedule can maximize your chances of landing a new GPU just as it hits the shelves.
- Use online tools to monitor in-store inventory. Retailers will often say when they have a product in stock at a local store on their websites, and even if they don’t, services like BrickSeek can often find that information for you. These methods aren’t foolproof—we can’t think of any stores whose inventory systems offer up-to-the-minute updates—but they can be useful.
3. Play the Lottery: Hope to Get Lucky With the Newegg Shuffle
Newegg decided to address the graphics card problem by taking a page from the sneaker industry’s playbook: raffles, which it dubs the Newegg Shuffle. You might be thinking that means you can enter for a chance to win a new GPU, but it’s not that straightforward. Instead, you enter for a chance to buy a new GPU, in much the same way sneakerheads have been hoping to score the latest drops at retail instead of being forced to pay resale prices.
This method is determined by luck, but so, to an extent, are the others on this list. Newegg is just more transparent about it. Whether recent Newegg Shuffles have even had video cards in them has been a roll of the dice, as well. Now, it’s just luck the whole way down: You have to hope you’re lucky enough to participate in a Newegg Shuffle offering graphics cards, and then you have to hope you’re lucky enough to win. May the odds be ever in your favor.
4. Buy a Pre-Built PC, and Sell the Other Parts
Even system manufacturers are struggling to source new GPUs for their PCs, but most have a more reliable line on finding some than the average consumer does. Much of that hardware is going to be put in a pre-built system out of which you could (at least theoretically) pluck the graphics card before selling the other parts to recoup your costs.
The problem is that finding buyers for components taken from a pre-built system isn’t as easy as it seems, even during a global chip shortage…especially when one of those components isn’t the most-coveted one. Many pre-built systems feature dated hardware, or at least middle-of-the-line components that don’t compete with the latest and greatest offerings, so potential buyers might prefer to wait for new hardware to come in stock than to settle for parts that you don’t even want yourself.
Also note that depending on the system and its installed CPU, the PC may not be able to run without a graphics card installed. Some desktop CPUs have an integrated graphics processor (IGP) that you can use to run a display and operate the system even if the video card has been pulled. But other systems (notably those based on most of AMD’s Ryzen processors) may rely on the video card for even the most basic graphics output. Some Intel CPUs, too, feature a disabled IGP; in most cases, these chips’ model names end in the letter “F” (such as “Core i7-11700KF”) and need a video card installed in the PC to push a signal to your monitor. This is especially common in major-maker prebuilt desktops, in which using an “F” chip saves the system maker a few bucks.
Pre-built systems are often expensive, too, especially if they feature modern graphics cards. Even if you do find buyers for some of the hardware you effectively shucked from the graphics card you actually wanted to purchase, you’re probably going to spend far more than you would have if you waited for that card to come back in stock and bought it at MSRP, or close to it. Don’t buy a pre-built system for this purpose unless you’re willing to make that trade, or you happen to need enough of the other bits.
5. Surrender to the Bot, and Become Part of the Problem (Just This Once)
We hesitate to propose this final option. It makes you (and us, by extension) part of the problem. But hey, here goes: In theory, you can either use a bot to buy a graphics card, or purchase the card you want from a scalper, who may well have plucked it from an online seller using one. We don’t advise either because (a.) it just makes things worse for other people and (b.) there’s no guarantee you’re going to get what you want, even if you fork over a bunch of bucks.
The Rent-a-Bot Route
Joining the mania, we rented a bot to buy a graphics card last year. It didn’t go well.
The process was more complicated than you might expect, required several hundred dollars up-front, and would have required an even greater investment to keep running. It also could have gotten our accounts banned from various online retailers, depending on their policies and the effectiveness of the bot creator’s anti-tracking technologies.
Even with all that, the experiment was a failure. In the end, we were able to buy a graphics card because of a notification from a Discord community. The bot didn’t do anything. Others have had more luck—which is why miners and scalpers have been able to buy so many GPUs—but the average person probably won’t be able to configure the bot correctly or afford the costs of running the bot until it finally achieves its goal.
Buying From a Scalper
Buying a new graphics card from a scalper would probably be the easiest method of acquiring one in 2022. Unfortunately, it’s also fraught with peril.
What if the listing is a scam? What if the graphics card doesn’t work? What if it’s used and seems to work, but is going to be significantly more prone to failure because it was strained to the max to mine cryptocurrency? Video cards don’t have odometers like cars, nor firmware like some SSDs do to track their cumulative usage stats. Platforms like eBay offer some protections for buyers, but most of the time, anyone who decides to buy from a scalper is exposing themselves to these risks.
Note that some of these problems apply to legitimate (or at least seemingly legitimate) buyers on these platforms, as well. Even if someone isn’t asking for some exorbitant amount of money for a new graphics card, they might be selling a card that doesn’t perform at its peak or is close to failure. Like the second owner of a used car selling it to a potential third, they may not know all its history. These problems are hard to spot at the time of purchase, too, especially since you probably weren’t planning to bring your system with you to put the card through its paces before you bought it.
So, What Should I Do?
By now, it probably seems like there isn’t a single good way to buy a graphics card in 2022. And that perception is pretty accurate. All of these methods require some degree of luck, some kind of time commitment, and some willingness to work harder to buy new hardware than most people would expect. The easiest way to buy a graphics card, at least for now, would be to wait for supply to improve in the indeterminate future. Indeed, right now the r/pcmasterrace subreddit, under the thread “Comprehensive guide on how to obtain a graphics card in 2022” recommends the following two-step plan…
Otherwise, our advice would be to combine as many of these methods—barring the last one—as you’re comfortable with. It’s easier than ever to keep track of online inventory and the stock at local stores. Why not join a few Discord servers and make an acquaintance at the closest electronics store? Maybe, it’s indeed worth looking into pre-built systems, even if they aren’t particularly cost-effective. (If you need some of the other parts, after all, the extra cost of the system might work out to the same spend as paying a scalper for the card alone.) And, hey, at least it’s free to participate in the Newegg Shuffle.
“Take my money!” has never been so hard as it is right now, but we think using several of these methods at once is the way to go. If you can hold out long enough, we’re confident you will land the card you are looking for at a price you are willing to pay.
