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Nvidia’s 30-series RTX graphics cards offer a big performance improvement over their 10- and 20-series rivals, but they’ve been nearly impossible to find reasonably priced for months now. Best Buy has been one of the best bets for finding a reasonably priced US card, and tomorrow they will be offering visitors to select physical stores the option to purchase a single graphics card – without worrying about bots, scalpers and – hopefully! – price inflation. Here are all the details you need to know to get your hands on one of the best graphics cards.
First of all: the timing. Best Buy employees will begin handing out tickets to people in line, one per person, starting at 7:30 am local time tomorrow, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. Tickets guarantee you the ability to purchase a single graphics card from the supply available there, which should hopefully allow gamers who need it to get a GPU without scalpers buying dozens to sell online later.
102 total locations participate, coast to coast, but I note that not all states or regions are covered – my hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico is not listed, nor is the larger Albuquerque, making the closest locations likely to be Colorado Springs about a five hour drive away. Best Buy’s blog post has the full list of locations, plus some safety notes and more.
If your nearest store isn’t on the list, or you just don’t feel like going to a brick and mortar place, don’t worry – the supply of graphics cards is still slowly improving. and we hope to see the cards continue to drop in price over the following weeks and months. We’ve rounded up all the best places to look for inventory in dedicated articles for each card, which also share details like suggested retail price, performance numbers, and links to our full review. Here are those links for your convenience:
In general, the higher numbered cards are more powerful but more expensive, with the “sweet spot” for 1080p gaming around the RTX 3060 Ti, 1440p gaming around the RTX 3070, and 4K gaming around the 3080. The new two Ti models, the 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti, are just good value for money compared to the Titan-grade RTX 3090 right at the top of the stack – but a card you can buy at MSRP is better than a card conspicuously “better value” than you are paying the odds for!
It seems that this kind of sale is more and more common and that the silicon shortage is finally coming to an end. We can only hope, right?
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