Zotac’s Nvidia RTX 3080 hit 20,000 pre-orders on Amazon, with buyers waiting a month for delivery - if they’re lucky

Zotac RTX 3080 Trinity
(Image credit: Zotac)

Nvidia’s RTX 3080 stock problems since launch are at this point well-documented, and adding more fuel to the fire we now have comments from Zotac about the staggering demand for this graphics card.

As Videocardz reports, Zotac announced on Twitter – in a now-deleted tweet – that nearly 20,000 pre-orders were erroneously taken by Amazon in Germany for the GPU maker’s entry-level RTX 3080 Trinity card, and the retailer didn’t have anything like that amount of stock.

Zotac clarified: “Almost 20,000 pre-orders have been received and, with the best of intentions, we cannot serve them in a short time, as much as we wanted. So again: We are infinitely sorry, but we also don’t know what went wrong here.”

The report suggests that orders may need to be canceled, and that a waiting time of weeks is expected for Zotac RTX 3080 Trinity GPUs to be shipped to those non-canceled buyers.

A further thread on Reddit which highlights the tweet suggests waiting times of up to a month for would-be RTX 3080 owners. Apparently Amazon did have a number of GPUs to sell – as you would hope – but Zotac has no idea why pre-orders weren’t stopped once that stock allocation was spent.

Some folks have said they’ve had their Amazon order for the Zotac 3080 canceled (on Reddit and Twitter), and others have been notified that they’ll have to wait, but an estimated delivery date hasn’t yet been provided – not a great sign.

In fact, there’s more than one comment on that Reddit thread stating that if they only have to wait a month, these 3080 buyers will be happy enough to get a graphics card that quickly – which isn’t surprising given the whole picture around 3080 stock.

Bot misery

Nvidia’s RTX 3080 sold out in literally minutes on launch day, as the rumor mill had predicted, with the likes of bots and those looking to profit from reselling graphics cards on eBay snaffling a lot of the available stock by all accounts. Making for a pretty miserable launch for gamers who wanted to buy a card to, you know, play games and stuff.

Nvidia apologized for the way the launch happened, and noted it was doing everything it could to stop bots and profiteers, at least on the Nvidia store – and that includes manually reviewing orders to make sure that cards end up in the hands of legitimate customers.

Third-party GPU makers are taking a similar stance in some instances, such as EVGA which said on Twitter that it is “hand reviewing all EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 orders, [and] any orders that are taken from ‘bots’ will be rejected”.

Tom’s Hardware also picked up on this and notes that EVGA is promising that ‘thousands’ of RTX 3080 graphics cards should become available in the near future, although they will be arriving in batches, not all at once this week.

Indeed, a batch of EVGA RTX 3080 XC3 GPUs came in stock yesterday on the manufacturer’s store, but unsurprisingly sold out inside an hour as the firm revealed on Twitter.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).