System News
As the GPU shortage continues, Mark Williams discovers unsavoury tactics in the supply channel.
What is going on with the GPU market at the moment? It’s running so hot right now that all new GPU releases are selling out in minutes, there are waiting lists, shipment update pages and even raffles for the ‘opportunity’ to buy a card. The RTX 3080 in particular is just a myth to most, as supply slowly trickles out to fulfil orders that were originally placed all the way back on launch day, two months ago!
The latest GPU to enter the fray is the RTX 3070 with its RTX 2080 Ti-levels of performance at half the price, and as you can appreciate, it too sold out very quickly as well. However, supply of the 3070 is stronger and for system builders like Aftershock PC its “been lucky to secure lots more stock of the 3070 prior to launch than was available with the 3080 launch, so will have plenty to fulfil all orders”.
Most of the supply shortage blame seems to be laid on Samsung’s custom, Nvidiatweaked 8nm process, and while that may be true, there’s equal blame being laid on the supply of the more exotic GDDR6X memory used on the 3000 series cards.
Whatever the issues are, supply is severely constrained and will continue to be, for Nvidia, well into the new year.
Talking with Richard from Aftershock PC about the supply of RTX 3000 cards, he mentioned that “we have actually had plenty of stock of the 3070 and 3090 since their respective launches, so no issues there. For the 3080s we have had to commit to massive amounts of motherboards in order to get stock to fulfil orders.”
For a boutique shop like Aftershock that only sells whole computers and not individual parts, having adequate GPU supply for its needs isn’t all that surprising. What was surprising is what Richard said when asked about the “massive amounts of motherboards” they must commit to buy from its supplier to be able to stock 3080s. Richard explained “buying 10 motherboards to get one 3080 is tough when we only sell whole systems. It means we have a heap more motherboards than we can match up with 30-series GPUs. Talking to our partners overseas, this seems to be a worldwide system imposed by distributors to try and clear out their stock of motherboards since the 3080s are in such short supply. Apparently during the start of COVID-19, each of the distributors purchased a giant amount of motherboards and things then slowed (unexpectedly) with all the Nvidia mess, so they were stuck with a tonne of motherboards. It seems to be the same case with all the distributors we are buying from.”
Richard further explained that it was mostly B450 and B365 motherboards that they were forced to buy initially, but that’s now ‘relaxed’ to be any motherboard chipset type.
What a bizarre side effect of the GPU shortage – the purchasing of ten motherboards as collateral to secure one RTX 3080. Let’s hope the RX 6000 series launch goes smoothly and helps alleviate this insanity, not to mention bring some competition back to the top end once again to put downward pressure on the ever-increasing prices.
“What was surprising is what Richard said when asked about the ‘massive amounts of motherboards’ they must commit to buy from its supplier to be able to stock 3080s. Richard explained ‘buying 10 motherboards to get one 3080 is tough’.”