Playing games

The loser shall not be Nvidia.

Some commiserations are due, this month. First, pity the poor reseller... when the new Nvidia RTX 3080 was announced it immediately rendered the 20-series cards unsellable. While it did take a couple of weeks before Australian pricing was known, the global launch – brought to us from Jensen’s now-famous kitchen – included US pricing and that was enough to make it clear that not a single 20-series card would ever be sold again at full price.

Overnight pretty much every online store was forced to slash prices. Perusing most of them, I saw cuts of around $300, typically. Today as I look around the price drop is more like $1,000 or more for a 2080 Ti. Lordy. I don’t personally know exactly what the margin is for that particular product line, but it’s fair to assume it’s not 40 to 50 percent, which is the discounting we’re seeing now that local pricing of the 3080 has been revealed.

We’ve reviewed the MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X in this issue. It has an RRP of $1,469. That means a 2080 Ti needs to sell for at least a couple of hundred bucks below that – which is exactly what’s happening. It’s a long way to fall from the pre-3080 prices of up to $2,400.

The ‘partner’ manufacturers must also be seething, as all 20-series inventory must now be discounted massively.

And, of course, the customers that bought one in the days and weeks prior to the 30-series reveal must be wishing they’d waited. I’m sure the returns departments at shops have been having some very interesting conversations with recent buyers.

But who saw this coming? Not APC, that’s for sure. Given the 20-series’ bad rep for its record-breaking pricing we all expected the 30-series to be more sanely priced, but the degree to which Nvidia backtracked on making its stuff super-expensive took everyone by surprise. Ultimately it’s good news, and the RTX 3080 has turned out to be pretty fantastic, as Chris discovers in his review starting on page 28. While unlikely, there’s also the possibility AMD’s very soon to be released Big Navi graphics card may create a second round of buyer’s regret. But that’s tech. You can’t wait forever...

It’s APC’s issue number 486 – so we’re marking the occasion with a nice feature story all about the Intel 486 CPU on page 52!