Don’t camp out at your local Best Buy for Nvidia’s RTX 3070 Ti. The retailer will only sell the graphics card online this time.
On Wednesday, a Best Buy customer service representative told PCMag the RTX 3070 Ti won’t be offered in stores, citing an internal message sent from the company. An employee at a Best Buy store in San Francisco also told us the RTX 3070 Ti would only be available via BestBuy.com. The company’s listing for the Founders Edition card also says “online only.”
As a result, the upcoming launch shouldn't be a repeat of the RTX 3080 Ti event. Last week, Best Buy decided to exclusively sell the Founders Edition card in stores, bucking the practice of selling the cards only online.
The event generated massive lines at Best Buy outlets across the country at a time when GPUs have been out of stock for months. However, many of the same stores received only 64 units or less, which left hundreds of customers disappointed.
It remains unclear why Best Buy is sidestepping the in-person sales. We sent several emails and made telephone calls to Best Buy’s public relations team, but have yet to hear back.
On the one hand, the in-store sales for the RTX 3080 Ti gave consumers a chance to avoid contending with scalper-run bots for the GPUs. But on the downside, camping out at a Best Buy all night for a GPU is no fun either.
We witnessed this last week at the West Los Angeles Best Buy store. “As you can see, there’s not a lot of social distancing going on in the line,” said one consumer named Joseph, who camped out all night for the for the RTX 3080 Ti. “There are no trash cans.”
If you plan on buying the RTX 3070 Ti tomorrow, we expect Best Buy's website to begin selling the card some time after 9 a.m. EST. But prepare for the sales to be swamped with user traffic from other buyers.