Newegg launches lottery scheme to sell rare CPUs and GPUs

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It’s not uncommon for the latest hardware to be in short supply, but the pandemic has pushed everything into overdrive. Being stuck inside for months led to an explosion of interest in games, and it made new high-end hardware like AMD Ryzen 5000 processors and Nvidia RTX 3000 GPUs nearly impossible to find. Newegg has a controversial solution: raffles.

If you were to go looking for an Nvidia RTX 3080 right now, you can buy one right away. However, you will probably have to pay around double the retail price to a scalper on eBay or Amazon. It’s been like that for months too. Sitting down on your (probably old and broken) PC to try and buy an in-demand component isn’t a great way to pass your quarantine, so Newegg is trying something new.

This week, the site briefly put up a page that explains its solution. The page was removed soon after, but not before the wider Internet was seen. The “Newegg Shuffle” event will allow interested customers to join a lottery for selected coins during a three hour window. Sometimes it will be bundles of multiple components that include the highly sought after AMD and Nvidia hardware, and other times it will be just those components.

Newegg will do a raffle, and those who win the lottery will be contacted by email to complete their 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 hope that you watch when a new stock appears and that you can beat everyone at the checkout. Instead, you’ll have to hope that Newegg’s random number generator favors you.

There was a marked worsening on the internet when Newegg’s page went live. The only bundle with an RTX 3080 had an Intel motherboard, and Intel processors aren’t exactly in short supply. Newegg later clarified that it was only a “test” to get feedback and improve the system. The retailer claims that future Shuffle events will include unique items in addition to combos. However, we don’t know when this will be the case. This might still be your best bet to get a processor or GPU at retail for the foreseeable future.

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