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Finding any GeForce RTX 3080 Ti card in stock, at least in the U.S., continues to be an exercise in futility — unless you want to pay eBay prices, in which case you can find RTX 3080 Ti cards for around $1,800. Yeah, thanks but no thanks. At present, there's only one Galax card listed on eBay, and it ships from overseas for $2,200, which we hopefully don't need to point out is an even worse deal. You can try to find a card for sale on the Galax Store, but right now the RTX 3080 Ti doesn't even show up as an option there. U.K. readers might have better luck, though, as there are currently three Palit / KFA2 RTX 3080 Ti cards in stock at Scan — at higher-than-MSRP prices, naturally.
If you're in the market for an RTX 3080 Ti, can find the Galax card in stock, and are willing to pay the high asking price, the Galax card works quite well and might even be able to justify its MSRP of $1,500. That's a lot of qualifiers, and at that price we'd be more inclined to shop around for an RTX 3090 — or, you know, just give the whole Ampere family a pass and wait for Lovelace, and pray that pricing and availability will be better by then.
As we said in the Zotac RTX 3080 Ti review, it's unfortunately still difficult to find any of the top graphics cards in stock, even at inflated prices. It's not clear whether the cards are still going into the hands of miners (unlikely, given the hash rate limiter), or if there simply aren't enough to meet demand. It's probably the latter, and given the widespread reports of continuing shortages — even Intel now says it expects to not be able to manufacture as many chips as it would like this quarter — that's not likely to change until 2022.
For PC gamers, it's been a terrible year for graphics card upgrades. Console gamers aren't doing that hot either, with PS5 and Xbox Series X still routinely out of stock and overpriced, but at least Sony says it has now sold over 10 million PlayStation 5 consoles, and Microsoft says the latest Xbox is its fastest selling console ever — which means maybe 5.6 million Xbox Series S or X consoles sold since launch. We don't know for sure how many RTX 30-series cards have been sold, but it's almost certainly far less than 10 million, across all models.
The one thing Galax appears to get right with the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti SG is memory cooling. We haven't tested that many other 3080 Ti cards, but the Galax card kept the GDDR6X memory running at less than 100C, regardless of what we threw at it. That might not sound like much, but it's better than 110C while mining on the Founders Edition. Meanwhile, we recommend gamers continue to wait for GPU prices to drop and inventory to improve. What goes up must come down, eventually.
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