Stock seemingly sold out before you can blink an eye has become the norm for NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 Series. Nearly two months later, not much has changed. Rumors continue to come out for more variants, but even if true, most wonder when they would be able to get a hold of one.
One could tally the number of reviews from retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy, and Newegg to confirm this. By now, those numbers could be far into the thousands, as new owners love to discuss their purchases. Well, that number hasn’t even broken five hundred yet, and that’s for all GeForce RTX 30 Series cards. They include reviews that have been posted by would-be buyers explaining their dissatisfaction at not being able to purchase a card.
Fake Sales Numbers and Reviews?
Some AIBs suggest that there aren’t stock issues, but one person is calling them on it. A user on the Baidu forum has posted an interesting chart with the total reported sales for some GeForce RTX 3080 cards from major Asian outlet JD.com. It shows a total of 743 GeForce RTX 3080 cards sold in October. The chart also breaks down the number of cards from each AIB sold and reviewed versus how many orders JD managed to fulfill. JD’s review policy requires users to provide proof of purchase, which creates questions as to where these reviews are coming from. An invoice and picture of the product are required as proof.
If you don’t read Chinese, that’s okay, because Wccftech has broken this down a bit. Each row represents a major AIB model. The fourth column represents how many cards were reported as reviewed/sold. The final column is how many that JD has actually sold. We can see some pretty dramatic discrepancies. That grand total doesn’t even manage to match one percent of the cards that JD claimed it had sold versus how many were reviewed. It is difficult to understand why AIBs such as ASUS, COLORFUL, GALAX, GIGABYTE, MSI, and ZOTAC would be posting fake reviews on JD.com. We’re not sure who would stand to gain by hiding supply issues.
Another Side to the Story
Perhaps there’s more to the story here, but some of this does align in part with other numbers we’ve heard about recently. What JD has shown for the GeForce RTX 3080 in October closely resembles what Danish retailer Proshop reported a few weeks ago. At the time, Proshop only managed to fulfill 447 orders for all three GeForce RTX 30 Series cards. However, the number of cards it tried to order from AIBs looks a little closer to those reviewed on JD. One thing that is certain is that many still cannot find these near-mythical graphics cards.