Don't waste time checking for Nvidia RTX 3080 stock, watch this bot on Twitch doing it for you live (updated)
Hats off to the selfless devs creating tools for the many.
Update: To clarify, it isn't actually Jef's stream, someone just decided to put it up for the benefit of others—what a sweetie.
Original story:
If you've been keeping up with recent PC tech news, you'll be aware of a staggering PC component stock shortage. In particular, prospective Nvidia RTX 30-Series buyers are all in a muddle—and that's putting it lightly. Even Nvidia is frustrated at the lack of stock, which doesn't bode well at all. Thankfully, there are still some valiant knights out there who, rather than designing reseller bots to screw us all over, have been designing useful tools for us poor GPU-less souls.
One such honourable developer, Jef LeCompte, has designed a bot that periodically scours online retailers for 30-series stock, and lets viewers know over the Falcodrin twitch stream when the cards become available.
Although it looks to be US and Canada specific, it does sound a helpful alarm when any RTX 30-series cards come in stock across those regions. What's more, it also lets viewers know (visually) when retailers are attempting to extort you out of house and home, with prices in excess of the set $1,900 limit. It also comes with a host of handy best practice guides for attempting to secure an RTX 3080, RTX 3090, RTX 3070, or RTX 3060 Ti in your shopping basket.
Best gaming PC: the top pre-built machines from the pros
Best gaming laptop: perfect notebooks for mobile gaming
I'd just like to say to you Jef: Thank you, good sir. It's nice to know that not all developers have turned to the dark side. You have done us all a great service—even if we do still have to compete with several thousand of your stream viewers. Actually its a very cute stream chat, lots of helpful people on there giving tech support, and just general camaraderie ensuing. Really nice to see.
Here's the link to the live stream directly, or you can join the party via the embed above. And, we have our own handy guide for how and where to buy an Nvidia RTX 3080, RTX 3070, or RTX 3090, in case you'd like some more useful info on the subject.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been rambling about games, tech and science—rather sarcastically—for four years since. She can be found admiring technological advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. Right now she's waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.
Nvidia says its surprisingly high $3.3B gaming revenue is expected to drop but 'not to worry' because next year will be fine *wink* RTX 50-series *wink*
AMD rumoured to be ditching future RDNA 5 graphics architecture in favour of 'unified' UDNA tech in a possible effort to bring AI smarts to gaming ASAP