When Nvidia announced the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti, we knew both cards would sell out immediately. Less than a week after launch, though, the RTX 3070 Ti seems like it never launched. Nvidia’s RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition went out of stock immediately in the U.S. and U.K., and despite a thriving scalping market, the card hasn’t shown up much on eBay.
As pointed out by The Verge, Nvidia partnered with Best Buy in the U.S. to distribute the RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti. Unlike previous Ampere launches, Best Buy sold a limited number of RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards in-store. The RTX 3070 Ti, however, was only available online and met hopeful buyers with a gray “sold out” button immediately after launch.
That’s not a strange occurrence given the ongoing GPU shortage, but things get interesting when looking at the secondhand market. Filtering by sold items on eBay, we found only four listings for the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition, two of which came from the same seller. There weren’t any Founders Edition cards listed for sale at the time of publication. Similarly, we couldn’t find Founders Edition cards on Facebook Marketplace or Mercari.
The RTX 3070 Ti isn’t a full-on paper launch, but it looks close. We weren’t able to track down any Founders Edition cards, but we found a few listings for board partner cards. EVGA’s FTW3 variant seems like the most readily available option, though it’s hard to tell given how few listings there are.
Interestingly, the FTW3 card is the only one available through EVGA’s queue system, which is one of the few ways to buy a new graphics card in 2021. There are two cheaper variants that aren’t part of the program. The RTX 3070 Ti hasn’t shown up much on Newegg Shuffle, either, despite the RTX 3080 Ti showing up in multiple Shuffles.
Digital Trends has reached out to Nvidia and Best Buy for comment, and we’ll update this story when we hear back.
The RTX 3070 Ti is an updated version of Nvidia’s RTX 3070. Sporting more CUDA cores and faster memory speed, we found in our RTX 3070 Ti review that it can deliver up to a 10% performance increase over the RTX 3070. The card launched for $599, though the few secondhand units we could find sold for above $1,400.