It is not uncommon for the latest computer hardware to be in short supply, but the pandemic has pushed everything to the limit. Being stuck for months on end led to an explosion of interest in games, and this made new high-end hardware like AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs and Nvidia RTX 3000 GPUs almost impossible to find. Newegg has a controversial solution: raffles.
If you were to hunt for an Nvidia RTX 3080 now, you would be able to buy one right away. However, you would probably have to pay about twice the retail price to a money changer on eBay or Amazon. It has been like this for months. Sitting in front of your (probably old and broken) PC trying to buy a component on demand is not a great way to quarantine it, so Newegg is trying something new.
This week, the site briefly released a page explaining its solution. He removed the page shortly after, but not before the Internet in general could have a look. The “Newegg Shuffle” event will allow interested customers to participate in a lottery for selected pieces over a period of three hours. Sometimes they will be packages of various components that include the much sought after AMD and Nvidia hardware, and other times they will be just those components on their own.
I’ve been advocating a lottery system for high-demand PC parts like the # RTX3080, so it’s great to see @Newegg finally implement it. But the “deals” combo needs to be discarded. It is not possible to build an AMD + Nvidia computer without buying an Intel motherboard. #failed #OMG #Nvidia #Intel pic.twitter.com/HeQjypjWsR
– Richard (@RyuGTX) January 20, 2021
Newegg will make a lottery, and lottery winners will be contacted via e-mail to finalize purchases. Products will be sold to winners on a first-come, first-served basis and you will only have two hours to complete your purchase before Newegg moves on to the next person on the list. With this system, you won’t have to wait until you are watching when new actions appear and you can beat everyone else for the checkout. Instead, you’ll have to wait for Newegg’s random number generator to do it.
There was a clear deterioration around the Internet when Newegg’s page went live. The only package with an RTX 3080 had an Intel motherboard, and Intel processors are not exactly missing. Newegg later clarified that it was just a “test” to get feedback and improve the system. The retailer says that future Shuffle events will include individual items in addition to combos. However, we don’t know when that will happen. It may still be your best chance to get a CPU or GPU at a retail price in the near future.
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