Idiotic tariffs, indifferent retailers, depraved flippers and AI mania are making the simple act of buying a graphics card the defining misery of PC gaming in 2025.
I stood in line at Microcenter Thursday morning to get a 9070 XT. I arrived at about 8AM (an hour before they opened), and the line was already wrapped around the side of the building. They let people in slowly after opening (apparently so as not to overwhelm the sales staff), and I got near the front door by about 10. They were handing out vouchers, and they actually still had quite a few left, with almost all the different models available when they got to me. After I got my card and left, I looked back at the store and the line still wrapped around the side of the building.
Frankly, from my perspective, I’d say the availability of cards was “surprisingly good.” It’s just that there was so much pent-up demand, even “surprisingly good” supply wasn’t good enough.
You want to know what the punchline is, though? Not expecting to have much choice in cards, and not having had time to research the differences between the ones made by different board partners, I ended up getting the “Gigabyte Gaming OC” version, which sounded good because it had a slightly higher max clock speed but was still $600. In retrospect, I should’ve gotten the PowerColor “Reaper” version because every other version is too wide to fit in my ITX computer case. [Womp, womp.] So now I have to decide between paying extra to replace a case that I otherwise like, or try to hope the cards actually do get restocked in a timely fashion (and still at MSRP) so I can attempt an exchange? I guess the moral of the story is, even if you “win” it’s still a fucking pain in the ass.
The last card I bought was a Radeon Vega 56, also on launch day (7.5 years ago!) and I was also damn lucky to get it. I cannot believe that the GPU market has been continuously fucked up since then!
I stood in line at Microcenter Thursday morning to get a 9070 XT. I arrived at about 8AM (an hour before they opened), and the line was already wrapped around the side of the building. They let people in slowly after opening (apparently so as not to overwhelm the sales staff), and I got near the front door by about 10. They were handing out vouchers, and they actually still had quite a few left, with almost all the different models available when they got to me. After I got my card and left, I looked back at the store and the line still wrapped around the side of the building.
Frankly, from my perspective, I’d say the availability of cards was “surprisingly good.” It’s just that there was so much pent-up demand, even “surprisingly good” supply wasn’t good enough.
You want to know what the punchline is, though? Not expecting to have much choice in cards, and not having had time to research the differences between the ones made by different board partners, I ended up getting the “Gigabyte Gaming OC” version, which sounded good because it had a slightly higher max clock speed but was still $600. In retrospect, I should’ve gotten the PowerColor “Reaper” version because every other version is too wide to fit in my ITX computer case. [Womp, womp.] So now I have to decide between paying extra to replace a case that I otherwise like, or try to hope the cards actually do get restocked in a timely fashion (and still at MSRP) so I can attempt an exchange? I guess the moral of the story is, even if you “win” it’s still a fucking pain in the ass.
The last card I bought was a Radeon Vega 56, also on launch day (7.5 years ago!) and I was also damn lucky to get it. I cannot believe that the GPU market has been continuously fucked up since then!