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It's difficult to determine the actual price of the Asus ROG Strix LC GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. Officially, it's supposed to be $2,199, but even then it's basically impossible to find the card anywhere. Amazon has a listing for the card, with two marketplace sellers asking $3,900 and $4,000. Yeah, thanks but no thanks. Most reputable places don't have any inventory, so for the time being this is basically vaporware.
When will the madness end? I don't know, but I think there's a good chance we'll see Lovelace and RDNA3 GPUs before we see RTX 30-series graphics cards on shelves selling at Nvidia's MSRPs — meaning, some time in late 2022 probably.
We get that this is an extreme card, and maybe some people could even justify paying $2,000 for it. Nvidia sold plenty of Titan graphics cards over the past five years, and this is basically as good as most of those (minus the 'professional' drivers). But when normal RTX 3080 Ti cards go for an average price of around $1,900 on eBay, and the air-cooled Asus ROG Strix RTX 3080 Ti has an average price of $2,250 on eBay during the past month, the liquid-cooled version will be out of reach of any 'normal' gamer.
That's basically the story of the past year. Every new graphics card we review feels like we're testing and writing about a product most people will never see or use. We keep hoping things will improve, but so far that hope has been all in vain. Hope can't change the realities of limited supply and extreme demand.
If a product like the Asus ROG Strix LC RTX 3080 Ti had launched a few years back, with a price of $1,200, we could have made a case for it being an extreme card built for enthusiasts. At potentially more than double that price, all we can do is give a sad shake of the head and look forward to better days.
Theoretically, Asus has an awesomely powerful and cool-running GPU for extreme enthusiasts. We'd love to be able to recommend buying one. Practically speaking, unfortunately, all we really have is a product page and a review sample; we don't even know where to point people to actually buy one, at any price. If you can find one in stock at a reasonable price, by all means, go for it. Given current market conditions, we continue to suggest figuring out what settings to use in order to play games on your current hardware while we wait (and wiat, and wait) this GPU shortage out.
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