Some mad people are bidding over $80,000 for an RTX 3080 right now

Absolute scenes

News by Katharine Castle Former Editor-in-chief

Published on Sept. 17, 2020

The RTX 3080 went on sale at 2pm BST today, and by all accounts it sold out pretty much instantly. Unsurprisingly, scalpers have already taken to eBay to try and get as much money as they possibly can for Nvidia's hot new graphics card - and some mad souls are currently bidding on an RTX 3080 Founders Edition for a whopping $80,600.

We already knew that the RTX 3080 was likely to be short supply until the end of the year, but this is something else entirely. The eBay listing has 105 bids on it at time of writing, with 200 people watching it - no doubt mostly for the entertainment value of watching some poor bastard spend their entire life savings on a heckin' graphics card, but still. What absolute scenes.

I hate to think how much it will eventually sell for by the time the bid ends in 14 hours. Probably well over $100K if people are stupid enough. So much for it being better than an RTX 2080 Ti for half the cost, eh?

Hilariously, it doesn't even seem like the listing is for a real card. In the title, it says: "Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 10GB GDRR6X 320-Bit Founders Edition Pre-order BESTBUY", implying that these bonkers bidders are actually bidding to get someone else's pre-order from Best Buy rather than a physical card that someone owns. The picture may show what appears to be an unboxed RTX 3080, but I wouldn't be surprised if this had been scrimped from a tech site who did an unboxing video earlier in the week when reviews went up.

It's not the only ridiculous eBay bid going on, either. Somehow, there's another Gigabyte RTX 3080 card up just slightly less at time of writing - $75,100 - with 92 bids and 126 watchers on it, which allegedly ships immediately (although how that's possible given they only went on sale just over two hours ago boggles the mind), and there's also another Founders Edition going for $12,100 at time of writing, with 21 bids and 11 watches on it, along with another going for $10,100 after 41 bids.

Heck, one's already been sold for a ridiculous $50,000 in just the last few minutes. Madness.

Needless to say, you shouldn't be paying anywhere near these sorts of prices for the RTX 3080, especially when it's "only" meant to cost £649 / $699. To get one at a reasonable price, be sure to keep an eye on our regularly updated RTX 3080 hub page, where I'll be adding in more pricing and availability information as soon as it comes through (although if you want to be really sensible about it, you should probably wait until AMD unveils their Big Navi cards at the end of October before you even think about laying any kind of money down anywhere).

At the moment, the RTX 3080 is pretty much sold out everywhere in the US, but some UK retailers are taking pre-orders with availability as early as tomorrow. Most retailers are expecting delays of at least a week, though, but the following from Ebuyer and Overclockers UK are probably the fastest way to get your hands on one right now:

From Overclockers UK:

From Ebuyer:

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