For those that don't know, I work at microcenter. Today I had the job of being there when the store opened for the GTX1080 launch.
About a week before launch The general manager told us that we should be getting 50 cards by the time the doors open and another 50 soon after. The mindset of the store was "I'll believe it when I see it" as previous launches have had very little stock and this was a huge amount. Sure enough,Thursday ended and we only had 12 cards in the store ready for door opening.
Normally they'd "dropship" more cards to the store on a launch, meaning they'd fedex some more over to arrive at a certain time of the day.
Store store opened an hour early and it wasn't advertised. so the people who waited for hour+ got them. Apparently the first guy was in the parking lot at 3am. I got to the store at 7am and saw 5 or 6 cars parked then.
Doors opened and we handed out vouchers, essentially their place in line, Went up to the registers and we got the cards for them and they went out the door just like that. Of course we had more people then cards when we opened so we took down their name and phone numbers on the promise we'd call them when more would be in stock. 8 more ended up coming at 11 am. But by that time the normal 10am opening time rolled around and the queue for more cards grew to easily 50 people with all the people thinking we'd open at normal hours.
At that point I went home as my shift was over.
Most people we enthusiasts just buying the latest and fastest card, when upgrading from a 970 or older/slower, they had the money to burn and didnt want to wait for the partner cards, good for them they have the fastest card on the market right this second. There was one dude buying on the impression it was going to be 40% faster than his 970SLI..... ok then dude.
You know, a shop here is claiming 1080 is 2-3 times faster than gtx980 (another country). Of course, thats the Nvidia party-line that stupid people follow.
What gets me angry is this: fury stocks at launch really low, press=amd is shit for not having enough stock to meet demand. 1080 stocks at launch reaaaally low, press = 1080 a huge success sold out everywhere.
Yeah I would have expected every where at any store would have enough stock to fill every shelf in the store. So now what? Stock is not available anywhere until the after market cards come out?
Can you hear the screams of anguish slowly rising when all the die hard founders buyers realize the people buying $50 cheaper cards are getting better performance and theirs is thermal throttling ?
@NJM1112, how does the stock of the 1080 at launch compare to the 480's stock at launch? There has been reports that the 480s are in much higher stock than the 1080 was.
The rumor that I heard was that the stock of the 480s is 20x what the 1080 was at launch. Sound about right? I imagine they left a ton stockpiled to ship after each place sold out, so it sounds about right to me.
What's with corporations not admitting issues? Nvidia don't admit they have manufacturing issues, amd doesn't admit they have power draw issues... Asus and MSI don't admit they are misleading the userbase with fake review samples... Now Intel is appealing the 1 billion dollars they need to pay to amd for false advertising back in Pentium 4 days... What is wrong with comming out and saying we know about the issue, we are working on it. Nobody will ask anything... No, you will lie and cover and what the fuck...