As part of my amateur attempt with AI tinkering, I paid overclockers.co.uk (known good) around £480 for an RTX 5060 Ti (16GB), back on the 20th July.
As you can imagine, it’s been a month already, but I’ve never really pre-ordered anything. How long should it be reasonable to wait, especially when I’ve actually had money taken from my account.
I did contact them about a week ago, and they got back to me fairly quickly with:
***I’ve looked into this for you and the item on order is out-of-stock with no estimated time of arrival at the moment, please accept our apologies for this delay. ***
If you would like to cancel or amend this order with this in mind, please let us know, and we’ll get this sorted for you as soon as is possible.***
But I dunno, what’s a reasonable amount of time to let them earn interest on my money, I wonder?
Yeah I noticed a few places lately doing shady stuff, like advertising last gen 3.5” drives at a cheap price, but out of stock, then the current gen drive at 30% more, with the same specs. There is no reason for that old part to still be listed if it’s never going to be available again, other than getting people to click the cheap price & visit your store.
In my dealings with OCUK I haven’t found them to be “scummy” but they do operate in ways that can feel a bit ignorant of individual customer experience and they can be a little unapologetic about things like pricing/availability.
I suspect what’s happened here is that they’ve put the pre-order out at a market price they were expecting to be able to match and then have only been able to secure stock at a higher price. They’re not obliged to give you the first cards that come in at a loss. It would be nice if they’d tell people with pre-orders what the situation is but that doesn’t seem to be their habit.
Personally, I would never bother with a pre-order unless it was for something like an upcoming new card and even then you need to be prepared for disappointment.
Thank you very much for that. I’ve never done Pre-ordering before, I just thought it was giving me the chance to secure a lower price - like an early bird discount. Sounds like that’s not the case I know I’m not paying £600 for this card though, the final use is far from urgent, so if needed I’ll cancel. I might ask them to pass on any interest they’ve accrued while holding my money
Just a small update - no GPU still. In 10 days it’ll be 3 months since I paid for it.
Really wondering if I should bother hanging on, or cancel and invest the money elsewhere for my business?
Technically I have a 5080 that’s in a workstation, I could always borrow that when not in use, and use a spare machine with a 10G 3080 as an agent. It could be arranged to only lean on the 5080 when needed. Wendell mentioned this arrangement recently, thought it was quite clever. Of course most things coming from him are!
Have you contacted them since they got stock again?
If they say no stock, say the site shows there is, but at a price hike.
You could say it’s a bit mean to not honour pre-orders first, and if they say they can’t at the price, you could have a bit of a go?
I would not leave it. If they were gonna ship you one, it would already be in process already.
I suspect the new batch came in, it they already gave the higher price a new SKU, and completely ignored current pre-orders
Either accept that they were playing funny games and essentially scamming people (you included), or push back hard to get them to honor the contractual agreement when they took payment (or it may force them to cancel the transaction).
Not sure what buyer protections you have in this case, but they basically allowed “pre-orders” at a price lower than they were willing to actually sell it for. Just watch out for cancelation fees or similar that they may play games with.
The price you “pre-ordered” a 16GB card for is close to what the 8GB cards are going for, I seriously doubt they would honor it.
Whenever I have done pre-orders elsewhere they either charge only when they will fulfill the order, or they charge a small percentage of the total first then the remainder on fulfillment.
To date they’ve never had stock of the specific model I paid for (LINK)
You can see it’s currently around £720, when I pre-ordered for £475 ish.
I’d agree, but I haven’t seen any stock yet, so I think they’re being decent about it. I just don’t understand the point in getting pre-order money for something that they’ll never have in stock.
You’d have hoped, wouldn’t you.
If they did that, it would be pretty shit of them, I don’t check every day but when I do, it’s never in stock. Earlier on I mucked up - thought it was, but I was looking at the OC version.
I’m tempted to think that way too, but they’ve generally been pretty decent in the past and they’ve repeatedly offered a refund of the money. I’d just kick myself if I got a refund and then suddenly it became in stock and I saved myself several hundred pounds by pre-ordering. Of course if they say I have to pay extra, I’ll just get a refund and be done with it. Unfortunately I don’t have the energy to kick up a stink, has to be directed towards maintaining my income!
Cheers for that, will keep an eye out for that sort of nonsense
Yeah I know, it does make you wonder what the end game is or what’s happening behind the scene. Did they informally get an agreement on supply and then the supplier bailed or figured out the stock/price issues. I just don’t know.
That’s interesting. I’ve never done a pre-order with them before, but with other companies I’ve only ever done it when they give an estimated date of delivery. I took a punt…a bad one it seems
I’d say they are only offering you a refund so it’s you that cancelled, not them. You ordered and paid in good faith for a product they advertised as available via pre-order. If they are not able to supply that product, they should supply you an equivalent product at the original price and admit they screwed up.
Thanks for that, yes it would be nice if they replaced with an equivalent product, though I recall the nightmare of getting a refund on a faulty SSD a year ago. Had to fight fairly hard for that, because the cost had gone up so much.
I do in part sympathise with them, with the prices being so unstable at the moment it would be easy for them to assume a certain price is reasonable, and then 8 minutes later the situation changes.
Yes, however, it’s not like the price rises were a shock & anyone with half a brain would ensure supply was locked in before advertising a product.
What they are doing is essentially offering to sell you a dozen eggs for $5 without owning any hens, or knowing how much they can buy them for from a random farmer somewhere that they aren’t sure has hens or chickens either..
I know I’m not paying £600 for this card though, the final use is far from urgent, so if needed I’ll cancel. I might ask them to pass on any interest they’ve accrued while holding my money 
