A Danish retailer has revealed how many Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics cards it’s received in the run-up to next week’s launch—and it’s slim pickings.
Proshop ordered 4,280 RTX 3070 units from various vendors including Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte. But as of Monday, it’s only received 106 units, or about 2.5 percent of the requested inventory. Another 185 units are on the way. But unless manufacturing goes into hyperdrive, the retailer’s stock of RTX 3070s will be paltry when the cards go on sale on Oct. 29.
The numbers from Proshop don’t bode well for customers eager to purchase the graphics card. Originally, the $499 RTX 3070 was supposed to go on sale last Thursday, but Nvidia decided to postpone the release in an effort to make more units available on launch day.
Based on Proshop’s numbers, the delay may do little to improve the inventory. It’s possible other retailers, such as Amazon, Best Buy, and Newegg, are having better luck stocking up on the RTX 3070. However, the other RTX cards—the 3080 and 3090—have been out of stock at all major retailers. If you want obtain them immediately, you’ll have to consider eBay, where third-party resellers have been hawking them for $1,000 over their asking prices.
Unfortunately, the shortage is expected to persist into the holidays. “I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supplies through all of the year,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last month in a call with journalists.
The supply problems have caused a few retailers to take extraordinary steps to be transparent about the product’s inventory. In Proshop’s case, the Danish retailer created a webpage tracking its supplies of the RTX 3000 cards. The same page shows that Proshop has only received 479 RTX 3080 units out of the 8,925 it ordered in total.
GPU maker EVGA, on the other hand, created an online queue for the RTX 3080 and 3090 cards, giving customers in line an 8-hour window to buy the products before their spot in the queue expires.
On Nvidia’s website, you can sign up to be notified for when the company plans on selling the special “Founders Edition” for the card on launch day. The RTX 3070 is expected to go on sale at 6 a.m. PST next Thursday at all major retailers.
