Nvidia’s new flagship graphics card arrives tomorrow at stores everywhere. This time, Nvidia has made basically no promises of ensuring enough stock for everyone, since those promises turned out to be bald-faced lies for the RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060. It’s going to be a feeding frenzy, and Best Buy is taking steps to make sure that at least nobody winds up hospitalized.
Rather than have a crush of people slam the doors as soon as Best Buy opens, the company has announced plans to hand out tickets an hour and a half before stores open. Each ticket will give the possessor the opportunity to purchase an RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition upon entering the store.
Best Buy employees will start handing out tickets at select stores across the United States starting at 7:30 AM local time. Each customer is limited to one ticket and one graphics card. Best Buy guarantees that the number of tickets will match the number of graphics cards they have available.
Expect lineups at most locations to start early in the morning, so prepare for a long wait. Stores open at 9 AM (although they normally open at 10 AM), and customers must be wearing a face mask or be fully vaccinated to enter. Face masks and hand sanitizer will be available at the door.
For the full list of stores that will have RTX 3080 Tis available tomorrow, head to Best Buy’s website here.
While it’s nice that Best Buy is taking steps, the real issue here is the ongoing chip shortage that is preventing more GPUs from being produced as well as the cryptocurrency crisis which is spiking demand for hardware. Neither of these problems is going to disappear overnight, so expect retailers to be out of stock fast.
