NVIDIA announced its new RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 GPUs last month, and they were up for sale starting from September 17th. But, limited supply coupled with unprecedented demand means it was one of the worst launches as far as graphics card launches go. Potential buyers had to stand in lines for hours to be able to get their hands on the new NVIDIA GPUs.
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The situation was made even worse by scalpers who bought large volumes of the GPUs and sold them at a much higher price at sites like eBay. Several scalpers sold the GPUs for more than twice the MSRP and aggravated the already scare launch of the RTX Graphics cards.
The situation has been so bad that several people in the community went to take a look at the eBay scalpers trying to sell RTX 3080 and RTX 3090s for twice the MSRP. The findings were posted on NVIDIA’s subreddit.
According to the findings, Starlit Partner was the seller selling MSI Trio RTX 3080 for almost double the retail price. The seller was listed as Starlit Partner, and the account was full of listings for new MSI inventory. After some research, it was evident that Starlit was operating from the same town MSI’s North American offices moreover, their Amazon page described them as a part of MSI Computer Corp.
Within hours the news spread over social media that MSI was scalping its own graphics cards.
To this MSI responded with a statement, confirming that Starlit Partner was a subsidiary of the company but wasn’t supposed to get fresh supplies of RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. MSI also confirmed that the people who were affected would be given a refund and promised to implement stricter policies going forward.
No one is sure what was actually happening, but one thing is for sure NVIDIA board partners would think twice before exploiting graphic card shortages in the future.
For more such updates stay tuned at Tech2Stop.
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