What you need to know
- It appears that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti never actually went up for sale on Best Buy's website.
- Listings for the graphics card allegedly switched from "Coming soon" to "Sold out" without ever being available for purchase.
- Even bots and computer scripts never saw the GPU up for sale, according to recent reports.
Seeing one of the best graphics cards sell out instantly isn't a strange sight these days. Due to chip shortages, almost all high-end graphics cards sell out right away. But the recent launch of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti raised some red flags for consumers. According to several reports, the RTX 3070 Ti never went up for sale on Best Buy's website (via PCMag).
The listing for the RTX 3070 Ti allegedly switched directly from "Coming soon" to "Sold out" at around 1:12 PM PST on Best Buy's website. Instantly selling out is standard for graphics cards, but even bots and computer scripts reportedly never saw the GPU up for sale.
"No one got the Founders Edition from Best Buy,' said a representative from House of Carts, a group that utilizes bots to purchase cards for resale, to PCMag.
Several scalpers told PCMag that they never saw the listing in question with a buy button. An operator of Fixitfixitfixit, a service that notifies people when online products become available, told PCMag that the 3070 Ti didn't appear to go in stock on launch day.
"My monitors didn't see any 3070 Ti's go in stock on launch day," said the operator. "As a matter of fact, from what I can tell no monitors on the market did."
Fixitfixitfixit checks stock for products every ten seconds, so the card would have had to sell out quickly to never appear available.
People also used computer programs to track the stock of the RTX 3070 Ti. According to those behind the tracking programs, the GPU never became available.
It's also strange that there don't appear to be many people reselling the RTX 3070 Ti, though that could be unrelated.
Best Buy and NVIDIA have not shared a comment on the situation at this time. A Best Buy Canadian blog states that the company plans to sell RTX 30 series GPUs in select stores, but Best Buy told PCMag that the policy only applies to Canada.
If you are looking for an RTX 3070 Ti, you may have better luck looking to get one in a pre-built PC.
