While the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 is absolutely an amazing graphics card, it's perhaps best known at this point for being hard to come by. However, not everyone has the same problem. An article on Techarp shows a mining rig holding 78 PNY RTX 3080s, which is 78 more RTX 3080s than most people can currently get their hands on. That's €54,522 worth of retail graphics cards. If that miner didn't use a bot to grab all those cards from retail sites, most RTX 3080s sell for around $1199 on sites like Ebay, so we're looking at $93,522 worth of hardware max. . Even after the expense, this is supposed to be enough to turn a profit before the end of the year, which helps explain why these graphics cards have been so hard to come by lately. We don't think the shortage is just due to mining, as it was in 2017, but cases like this certainly don't help, that is, as noted. Paul Lilly from PC Gamer, the image shown by Techarp is not just airbrushed.
Graphics cards for people
For a graphics card released three months ago, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 is very hard to find in stock anywhere, as long as you're not prepared to drop twice the retail price. And at the moment, we're not quite sure when people will be able to easily go to Newegg and buy a new graphics card. Back in November, we learned from Colette Kress, Nvidia's CFO, that it would take a couple of months for Nvidia Ampere uptime to keep up with demand, which means we're probably still looking at February 2021. However, if we start to Seeing crypto miners move away from dedicated ASIC cards and back to graphics cards meant for gamers, this could screw up the whole availability thing. However, given that we're constantly hearing that Nvidia plans to release many more graphics card releases, including Ampere mobile GPU leaks and the rumored RTX 3080 Ti that just won't go away, it's safe to assume that Nvidia has plans to drastically increase production of its silicon. But the official story remains the same as it has been for the past two months: graphics cards are out of stock and we won't know when more stock will arrive until it arrives. Hopefully anyone wanting to buy an RTX 3080 can get one without breaking the bank to pay the aftermarket price for one.