Retailer Locks RTX 30 Series GPUs Behind a paywall

US electronics retailer Best Buy requires a $200-a-year "Totaltech Membership" to allow customers access to the retailer's full range of Geforce RTX 30 series cards. All graphics cards offered behind the payment barrier are said to have been sold out after a few hours.

If you wanted to get a graphics card from Nvidia's Geforce RTX 30 series, Best Buy is said to have been a reliable dealer for it. They occasionally offer the graphics cards from the Geforce RTX 30 series for the RRP. However, those times are now a thing of the past. Because in order to be able to take advantage of such an offer at Best Buy, you have to sign up for a so-called " Totaltech membership " there, which costs just under 200 US dollars a year and brings with it various advantages. Exclusive member prices for high quality graphics cards

Among other things, membership comes with benefits such as free technical support from Geek Squad, free two-day shipping, a 60-day return period, or product protection of up to 24 months. Nvidia's GPUs probably come with "access to exclusive Totaltech member prices". Best Buy is said to have offered the RTX 30 graphics cards exclusively for these member prices in one afternoon until they were all sold out just four hours later.

This news also made the rounds on Reddit. One user assumes that scalpers and miners, in particular, have jumped at this offer and wants to prove this with screenshots. Accordingly, certain people are said to have bought up to seven graphics cards alone. For gamers who would like to afford models for the MSRP or a price close by, this news is certainly not good news.

Best Buy could also apply this process to other highly sought-after electronics, such as next-gen consoles (PS5 and Xbox Series X/S), which could potentially add more salt to customers' wounds. It will also be interesting to see whether other retailers will also discover this business model for themselves.

In other news, a few days ago there was speculation about a B2 stepping of Ryzen 5000 and that is now also in retail. A screenshot from GPU-Z proves that the recently purchased Ryzen 7 5800X is the new version.

The B2 stepping of AMD’s Vermeer CPUs is commercially available. From the outside, it is not possible to determine which stepping is involved – not even the OPN provides the desired information. The package was assembled in week 02/2022.