cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

General Discussions

Best Buy Now Requires $200 Membership Fee for all Nvidia GPU Purchases

Despite how hard it’s become to purchase a GPU at anywhere near MSRP over the past two years, there was still one beacon of hope. Best Buy has been the sole distributor of Nvidia’s extremely reasonably priced Founder’s Edition cards, so if you got lucky and were able to add one to your cart, you could actually get an RTX 3080 for $699, for example. That’s a smokin’ deal, as those rare cards sell for around $2,000 on eBay. However, as of yesterday that beacon has been extinguished. Best Buy has seemingly locked all Nvidia GPUs behind an “exclusive” membership program called Totaltech, which costs $200 per year. Even worse, the new requirement applies to all Nvidia GPUs, including ones from its Add-in Board (AIB) partners, not just the Founder’s Edition cards.

Best Buy’s new “strategy” was revealed to gamers on Thursday of this week, which is the usual day of the week when the company has “drops” for GPUs. Hopeful gamers polished their F5 keys and headed to the company’s website, only to find that all of the its GPU listings were now labeled as an Exclusive Access Event. Even worse, the only way to gain access to this exclusive event was to enroll as a member of the company’s Totaltech program.

But being a Totaltech member doesn’t guarantee you the right to buy a GPU. It  just offers you extended warranty, free Geek Squad, free shipping, better support, and so forth. Totaltech is the price of admission BB is charging if you want to buy a graphics card from the company. It seems more like a scalper tax than anything else, since people buying multiple cards wouldn’t scoff at an extra $199, but that’s a bit steep for someone who just wants to buy a single gaming GPU for themselves.

 

 

It now costs $199 just to have the chance to buy a GPU at Best Buy. (Image: Reddit)

And of course, that’s exactly what happened according to online reports: scalpers signed up in droves and bought every single card they could get their hands on. Although Best Buy limits the sale of cards to one model per person, that doesn’t prevent someone from buying an RTX 3080, 3070, 3060, and so forth, in one transaction, which is precisely what Videocardz reports happened. Also, someone on Reddit linked to an Imgur gallery showing receipts for multiple people who were busy stockpiling GPUs on Thursday.

It seems as if this new restriction just locked out all the gamers, and let the scalpers and their bots run wild in the Best Buy store for once. One Reddit user who uses bots posted a comment in the thread about it, noting that with this “paywall” in place, scoring a GPU has never been easier, writing “Botting was the easiest it’s been yet, all you needed was a decent bot and a few tt accounts to cook a bakers dozen ;).” Said user defended his or her actions by pointing out they use the cards for mining, which unsurprisingly didn’t stop the avalanche of hateful comments.

All in all, this seems to officially be the end of the line for those who were still holding out hope they would score an Nvidia Founder’s Edition GPU for themselves. Best Buy was the last place to get one at MSRP. Of course, there’s still the EVGA queue, which to its credit hasn’t been price gouging either, but the wait time could be months. Your humble author signed up for an original RTX 3080 when the queue first opened after the Ampere launch, and had yet to receive a notification about it a year later.

There’s always the Newegg Shuffle too, which allows you to enter a random drawing for the chance to buy a GPU, but Newegg has heavily inflated prices, and usually bundles them with power supplies, monitors, and other accessories, so you could end up paying a ridiculous premium for a package of parts, when all wanted was a GPU. Newegg was also found to be forcing people to buy faulty power supplies as part of its bundling program previously. The Newegg Shuffle isn’t exactly a great option either.

6 Replies
ThunderBeaver
Miniboss

Saw the report on YouTube.

It's like Invidia is going the way of Apple.

Apple Care only for repairs. Now for Invidia its Geek Squad only for repairs.

Makes since considering the outrageous prices for even mid tier Invidia GPU's.

Oh and if Geek Squad finds a defect in the GPU that you failed to report within either 14 or 30 days of the initial purchase they can refuse both repairs and refunds. 

I don't know why Invidia though this was a good deal to establish with Best Buy but I'm pretty certain it's going to bite them in the backside. Get ready to watch Invidia stock plumet over the next 2 years. 

Fast way to alienate present and future Best Buy customers beside scaring away potential Best Buy purchases by customers.

Best Buy marketing strategy might be great at bringing more traffic to it Geek Squad and possibly Online purchases with free shipping but in today's economy it is a foolish strategy in my opinion.

Most Customer's won't spend an extra $200.00 for a service they may never use.  Besides Geek Squad is very expensive and unreliable computer repair service which is probably why Best Buy is trying to force Customers to use Geek Squad for their computer needs by the new service.

Basically you are paying $200.00 for the same thing that Amazon advertises in Amazon Prime only more expensive.

You know this reminds me of that "protection plan" thing that pops up on Newegg every time I drop an item into my cart which I always dismiss.

There is a possibility that Invidia could have all Vendors selling their GPU's require a purchase of this $200 or more protection plan on their products.

It seems like economical suicide from my prospective especially in todays PC parts market. 

Imagine Invidia requiring people to have an annual subscription fee just to get updates and customer support on top of spending $3K to $4K on one of their flagship GPU's.

I thought corporate greed had hit the attic now they're just tearing the roof off.   

This is the good 'ol American Way! We have this bitch of an inflation curse and money is short for a good percentage of the country so what better time to screw over your fellow citizens? Way to stick together! Is this "Me Generation" ever going to lighten up?

Now I thought I had heard of Graphics Card manufacturers were going to produce some kind of mining only GPUs? No? Like they should just make modules that were, say, blocks of 3080s all welded together or something like a ten block, a 20 block, 50 block etc then they get all the power they need, Unvidia would sell them faster or at least in big gulps and it would separate them from us from them, at least on paper, in the market.

I think this is like cities getting federal funding for them making a percentage of the new construction be affordable housing but in reality all they had to do was PLAN to build affordable housing and there wasn't any oversight to see if they had actually followed through. Semantics, meh

I know, I know, that's all "in a perfect world" but when's the breakthrough good news going to happen? My horoscope clearly stated the world was going to change to one of peace and harmony very soon and if I have to track down my psychic it won't be pretty.

-Hopeful... yeah, that

0 Likes
hrpuffnstuff
Miniboss

Buy directly from the Nvidia store and they have stock right now bar the FE cards.

0 Likes
DimkaTsv
Miniboss

Don't have Best Buy in my country, don't have Amazon Prime as well (they just never were available) and also don't have Nvidia or AMD presence in my country as well. Welcome to isolation (We still can get new cards, though... Just prices are bit higher)
So i am saying to hell with these practices. There are other ways.

0 Likes