According to EVGA, one of NVidia’s primary manufacturers, a shipment of GTX 30-series graphics cards has been stolen from a truck in California. I do not care how badly you think you need more frames per second, you should not rob a truck to do it. The frames just aren’t worth it. I promise you that your eyes will adjust to whatever framerate a game can throw at you in like…a few minutes, max.
For those of you who are blissfully unaware, graphics cards seem to have become more valuable than certain life-saving medications. This is the result of a global chip shortage caused by the pandemic, paired with ridiculous levels of demand from gamers and crypto-miners. Purchasing a graphics card has become a living nightmare, with all the wait lists, lotteries, bot-nets, and scalpers you can imagine. Now this obscene demand has prompted someone to steal an entire shipment of cards.
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Each stolen card is marked by a serial number, so if you attempt to register these stolen cards, it will not work. However, you don’t need to register a graphics card to actually use it, so not only can purloined graphics processors fly under the radar, but people who purchased said cards may be totally unaware their card was stolen until they attempt to register it.
Per EVGA’s post, these cards have a retail value of between $US329.99 ($AU446) and $US1,999.99 ($AU2,702). These numbers rise even higher on the second-hand market (a 3060 can run you as much as $US600 ($AU811), double the retail price), where these cards are likely to be sold.
The shipment was stolen when en route to an EVGA distribution facility, so the lucky few awaiting an extant order have no need to worry. New buyers, however, are firmly out of luck for this shipment at the very least.
Hopefully the mass shortages resolve before GPUs replace paper money in the post-metaverse, post-apocalypse we’re going to enter in a few years.
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