RTX 3000 Series Micro Center Discussion & FAQ!

TSTonyV

[FAQ Updated 10:53AM 5/3/2021]*

So in case anybody missed it, just earlier today NVIDIA did their announcement stream for the new RTX 3000 series cards. 

The main thing I took away was obviously ray tracing performance making huge leaps forward. Double the performance of previous generation with ray tracing on. What I'm curious about will be benchmarks in non-ray tracing games, but we'll probably have to wait for reviewers to come out with those details. 

There was a lot of information packed in from pricing to performance and features, so I'm curious, what are you looking forward to? Do you plan on upgrading your rig? Do you like the new look? Do you think the RTX 3090 should come with a GPU support bracket in the box considering how gigantic it is?

FAQ: Availability for NVIDIA RTX 3000 Series Graphics Cards

We know demand for these new graphics cards is high. We’re working hard to make these new, exciting products available to as many customers as we can. Please see below for answers to popular questions. You may also post your question here and we’ll do our best to respond quickly.

 

Q.) Will you have the latest 3000 series cards on their release dates?

A.) Yes, we will have a variety of top brand RTX 3000 cards available on their respective launch dates.

Q.) Which model of RTX 3000 graphics cards are available?

A.)  We will have RTX 3000 series graphics cards from our top vendors: ASUS, Gigabyte, Zotac, EVGA, and MSI, including gaming and overclocked models. These will vary store to store. Available models will be listed in the graphics cards category at launch.

 

Q.) How much do the 3000 Series video cards cost?

A.) Up-to-date pricing for our cards will be posted on the website once they’re available.

 

Store Related Questions

Q.) Are you doing pre-orders?

A.) At this time, we will not be offering pre-orders.

 

Q.) Will I be able to reserve or buy them online?
A.) We will not be offering reservations for in-store pick-up, or shipping for these video cards due to the high demand. 

Q.) What is the process to purchase one of these cards?
A.) Please check out our latest information and process on this at: https://community.microcenter.com/discussion/8756/random-selection-raffle-system-and-faq

Q.) Can I buy more than one? 

A.) We will be limiting purchases at this time to one per household. With limited availability, we want all of our customers to have a chance to be a part of this new product release.

Q.) Were Micro Center Associates able to buy the new graphics cards?

A.) Due to the high demand and constrained inventory, we’ve restricted employee purchases, so we can get new products into the hands of our loyal customers.

Green_LED

I'm really looking forward to some benchmarks to come out. Hopefully AMD has good enough competition so NVIDIA drops prices. The new look is sleek and modern but the 3090 is so massive there's no way GPU sag won't be an issue. NVIDIA said 3090 drops on Sept. 24th on their website but I wonder when Micro Center will get it in stock. Overall the results look promising and I hope the benchmarks reflect what they released!

Ichthus

Green_LED said:

I'm really looking forward to some benchmarks to come out. Hopefully AMD has good enough competition so NVIDIA drops prices. The new look is sleek and modern but the 3090 is so massive there's no way GPU sag won't be an issue. NVIDIA said 3090 drops on Sept. 24th on their website but I wonder when Micro Center will get it in stock. Overall the results look promising and I hope the benchmarks reflect what they released!

Yeah, real benchmarks I think are definitely going to be important. The stream showed performance with both Ray Tracing and DLSS 2.0 on but there are a ton of games out there that don't support either of those. If we're getting a 2x performance increase even out of those situations, RIP everybody who bought a 2080ti in the last couple months. 

Green_LED

Ichthus said:

Yeah, real benchmarks I think are definitely going to be important. The stream showed performance with both Ray Tracing and DLSS 2.0 on but there are a ton of games out there that don't support either of those. If we're getting a 2x performance increase even out of those situations, RIP everybody who bought a 2080ti in the last couple months. 

I'm honestly a bit disappointed that the price was higher than originally thought / what was leaked. I thought 1400 was perfect for a Titan class performance card. Guess I'm going to need to save a bit in these coming weeks. I haven't traditionally followed GPU releases. When should benchmarks be released? After card release date or before?

AidanOG

If I heard correctly at the GeForce event today, the 3080 comes out on the 17th of september. Does anyone know when Microcenter usually gets parts after they come out? I am waiting to get my hands on the RTX 3080 so I can build a new gaming pc.

TSTonyV

Green_LED said:

Ichthus said:

Yeah, real benchmarks I think are definitely going to be important. The stream showed performance with both Ray Tracing and DLSS 2.0 on but there are a ton of games out there that don't support either of those. If we're getting a 2x performance increase even out of those situations, RIP everybody who bought a 2080ti in the last couple months. 

I'm honestly a bit disappointed that the price was higher than originally thought / what was leaked. I thought 1400 was perfect for a Titan class performance card. Guess I'm going to need to save a bit in these coming weeks. I haven't traditionally followed GPU releases. When should benchmarks be released? After card release date or before?

Only the 3090 is above the leaked pricing that we saw before, and in reality sinceit's the replacement for the RTX Titan I'm not too upset about it. There might be a 3080ti type card that occupies the slot in between the 3080 and 3090 released later.

The 3070 and 3080 are both at the same MSRP as the 2070/2080 respectively which was a nice surprise. For $500 the 3070 looks like it may be a very strong price:performance ratio and it may become the new GTX 970. Can't wait for full reviews to come in. I may upgrade my 2080 Super if everything shapes up well...

AidanOG said:

If I heard correctly at the GeForce event today, the 3080 comes out on the 17th of september. Does anyone know when Microcenter usually gets parts after they come out? I am waiting to get my hands on the RTX 3080 so I can build a new gaming pc.

We try to have parts available on the day they actually release, especially for big releases like GPUs,  but yields and availability have been really odd for PC parts since COVID started and for all we know they just might not have the stock at the beginning. I expect we'll probably have them on release day but we don't know for sure yet. Hopefully we get some more information in the future. 

Waffler

Well! Sure glad I didn't pony up for a 2070 Super like I planned. Looks like the 3070 will be plenty for glorious ultra widescreen 2K gaming!

Is there not going to be a 3060 variant, though? No mention that I could see.

TSTonyV

There will be, they always release the higher end stuff and fill out the lower end of the product stack later. 

I've been doing some reading on NVIDIA's articles that went up and I think I'm most excited for RTX I/O. Looks to be the same concept as the PS5 where they load/stream assets directly from SSD to the GPU to bypass the CPU and increase loading times substantially. But it's not going to be widely available for a while because Windows and developers will have to specifically implement it which is a downside. However, I think it bodes well for the future and could give a real reason for average users to have NVMe SSDs

Waffler

TSTonyV said:

I've been doing some reading on NVIDIA's articles that went up and I think I'm most excited for RTX I/O. Looks to be the same concept as the PS5 where they load/stream assets directly from SSD to the GPU to bypass the CPU and increase loading times substantially.

Agreed.

*ahem* Looking at you MS Flight Simulator 2020...

TSTonyV

Waffler said:

TSTonyV said:

I've been doing some reading on NVIDIA's articles that went up and I think I'm most excited for RTX I/O. Looks to be the same concept as the PS5 where they load/stream assets directly from SSD to the GPU to bypass the CPU and increase loading times substantially.

Agreed.

*ahem* Looking at you MS Flight Simulator 2020...

Nevermind the fact that they're running Flight Sim 2020 on DX11 with no DX12 support...

ryau

I'm looking to upgrade from a 2070 Super to a 3070.... as well as gaming performance, I'm hoping it'll really do well folding with more than double the cuda cores. 

TSTonyV

ryau said:

I'm looking to upgrade from a 2070 Super to a 3070.... as well as gaming performance, I'm hoping it'll really do well folding with more than double the cuda cores. 

I heard that something with the CUDA core design/implementation has changed, so it's not ACTUALLY double in practice. I could be wrong about this, as I can't find a source that clearly talks about this, but I definitely remember reading this somewhere. Maybe I'm wrong.

ryau

TSTonyV said:

ryau said:

I'm looking to upgrade from a 2070 Super to a 3070.... as well as gaming performance, I'm hoping it'll really do well folding with more than double the cuda cores. 

I heard that something with the CUDA core design/implementation has changed, so it's not ACTUALLY double in practice. I could be wrong about this, as I can't find a source that clearly talks about this, but I definitely remember reading this somewhere. Maybe I'm wrong.

Makes sense since they're on a new architecture, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

TSTonyV

ryau said:

TSTonyV said:

ryau said:

I'm looking to upgrade from a 2070 Super to a 3070.... as well as gaming performance, I'm hoping it'll really do well folding with more than double the cuda cores. 

I heard that something with the CUDA core design/implementation has changed, so it's not ACTUALLY double in practice. I could be wrong about this, as I can't find a source that clearly talks about this, but I definitely remember reading this somewhere. Maybe I'm wrong.

Makes sense since they're on a new architecture, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Yeah, I finally found some discussion on Reddit about it. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/ikok1b/explaining_amperes_cuda_core_count/

I don't know understand the technical aspects but basically the way the CUDA cores in the new Ampere GPUs operate is different and if you want to get a more realistic comparison of the cores, you should divide NVIDIA's core count on the new GPUs in half. So for the 3080 vs 2080 it's 8704/2 = 4352, vs 2944 of the RTX 2080. There's probably more to it than that, but that's the general idea as far as I can tell

Edit: so as of conversing with @TSMichaelB, he's offered me some clarity and that the reddit thread I linked doesn't quite have it right. You can't just directly compare the core counts and then cut them in half like that without knowing more about the rest of the tech in the cards. There's a lot more factors at play in the architecture, and it's not correct to say that each core is just "half performance" or anything like that because we don't have all the information yet. 

KidCookie

Not sure if this was answered, but has MicroCenter been able to say whether or not they are sellign the 30 series NVIDIA cards on the 17th? And if so, are you able to pre-order?

TSPhillipT

@KidCookie

We do not do pre-orders and our stock should update online as soon as we get the cards in.  

crobot

TSPhillipT said:

@KidCookie

We do not do pre-orders and our stock should update online as soon as we get the cards in.  

Can you clarify if that stock will appear online prior to release date of the 17th (or at least prior to doors opening)?
Ideally if stock is limited and we're getting their before MC doors open, it'd be useful to know which AIB's are available and what the prices are going to be.

Also, are there any specific plans for how a line situation would be handled with covid? If the product releases on the 17th, will we need to get there and claim the cards in person (as in, no online purchases), or can they be purchased prior to doors opening and held for pickup/curbside?

GTAWWEKID

I would also like to know which store will have it on day 1 and how many. I have the funds to pay full price today, yet 2 weeks away from release with no pre-orders and lack of information of availability.

TSPhillipT

@crobot
Stock should show up online before doors open the day we get them in.  I cannot guarantee any of our stores will have it day 1 and we have no information on which stores are receiving them on release date.  We also do not know which board partners our stores will be receiving and when.  Stock online will be updated when we do get them in.  

For line, I have not heard any changes in our system, customers can wait/camp in front of the store.  When we will be getting closer to open, we will begin implementing a wait list system if the line over caps our store limit.  This is all currently how we are handling the opening rush.  

PowerSpec_MichaelB

TSTonyV said:

ryau said:

TSTonyV said:

ryau said:

I'm looking to upgrade from a 2070 Super to a 3070.... as well as gaming performance, I'm hoping it'll really do well folding with more than double the cuda cores. 

I heard that something with the CUDA core design/implementation has changed, so it's not ACTUALLY double in practice. I could be wrong about this, as I can't find a source that clearly talks about this, but I definitely remember reading this somewhere. Maybe I'm wrong.

Makes sense since they're on a new architecture, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Yeah, I finally found some discussion on Reddit about it. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/ikok1b/explaining_amperes_cuda_core_count/

I don't know understand the technical aspects but basically the way the CUDA cores in the new Ampere GPUs operate is different and if you want to get a more realistic comparison of the cores, you should divide NVIDIA's core count on the new GPUs in half. So for the 3080 vs 2080 it's 8704/2 = 4352, vs 2944 of the RTX 2080. There's probably more to it than that, but that's the general idea as far as I can tell

Edit: so as of conversing with @TSMichaelB, he's offered me some clarity and that the reddit thread I linked doesn't quite have it right. You can't just directly compare the core counts and then cut them in half like that without knowing more about the rest of the tech in the cards. There's a lot more factors at play in the architecture, and it's not correct to say that each core is just "half performance" or anything like that because we don't have all the information yet. 

Yeah... To further clarify on this, you can't simply compare CUDA core counts or "paper specs" when making a comparison between older and newer hardware architectures. There is so much going on under the hood that it's not even remotely close to being accurate. The biggest specifications (Texture Maping Units, Render Output Units, etc) have yet to be revealed, and those play a much larger role than just CUDA cores by themselves.

That being said, there are some interesting charts floating around online that appear to show Ampere's architecture topology, and it definitely has some key differences to Turing.


(Source: Hardwareluxx)
The image above appears to show the architecture topology of Ampere (RTX 3000 series). Pay close attention to the "Datapath 1" and "Datapath 2" sections. This is the part that is confusing most people and leading them to believe that the actual CUDA core counts are "inflated". This is not the case. Nvidia confirmed that these datapaths are not independent of one another, and can be access simultaneously. This means each SM cluster can do either 32 FP32 operations per clock, OR 16 FP32 and 16 INT32 operations per clock. To put this into perspective, Turing's design could only do 16FP 32 and 16 INT32, it was unable to interleave or run parallel across both datapaths for a theoretical doubled FP32 throughput as it only had a single datapath to begin with.

Now what this does mean, is that Ampere's INT32 performance may or may not be much better compared to Turing, but this is yet to be seen, pending some hands on testing. It's important to remember that the cache design is different here too, as Nvidia also doubled the shared memory and L1 cache for the larger SM's to accommodate this change in datapath design.

The takeaway is that the actual SM's themselves that make up the CUDA core configurations are fundamentally different and cannot be compared 1:1. In fact, you'll be hard pressed to compare any architectural change between GPU's on a 1:1 scale due to how quickly technology evolves. 

Zwarrior972

HI! Was wondering if you'll have the cards in stock day 1? i.e Will I be able to order/buy an RTX 3080 in person on the 17th of september?

GucciGoose

If the 3080’s are available on day 1, would you be able to reserve for in store pickup or is it going to be first come first serve in person only?

TSTonyV

Zwarrior972 said:

HI! Was wondering if you'll have the cards in stock day 1? i.e Will I be able to order/buy an RTX 3080 in person on the 17th of september?

I believe we are planning to have them on day 1, but we don't know what availability is going to look like yet unfortunately. I've heard reports of low availability on launch from NVIDIA so we don't know for sure what the situation will look like yet. 

GucciGoose said:

If the 3080’s are available on day 1, would you be able to reserve for in store pickup or is it going to be first come first serve in person only?

Normally with new big releases like this reservations are not available at first because of how high demand is so I would expect these to be first-come-first served to start off with. I could be wrong about that, but that's usually how these things go. 

Waffler

It's funny, my birthday is actually 9/17. I'd treat myself to a 3070 if I had the money for it...

Enamelized

I've been awaiting the information about the Nvidia RTX30 series and really looking forward to picking up a 3080. Would love to be able to grab a 3090 but just think it would be a bit much and that price really just makes it out of my range unfortunately. I do like the overall look of the new cards and the whole air intake and exhaust out the back of your case to help improve cooling. Certainly looking forward to some benchmarks to show some additional data on the performance we heard about.

TSTonyV

If anybody is interested, Digital Foundry did a test of the 3080 and they saw 70-90% performance gains vs. the 2080, which matches up well with NVIDIA's "Up to 2x performance" claim. 

https://youtu.be/cWD01yUQdVA

They don't list actual FPS, probably for NDA reasons or something like that, but Digital Foundry is a reliable source so this has a lot of merit. 

Enamelized

that was an Interesting watch, thanks for sharing @TSTonyV

TSTonyV

I think it's very promising. Obviously the titles and situations in the games were curated by NVIDIA but they showed off some RT/DLSS scenarios and pure rasterization scenarios so I think this is a good indication of what we can expect in general, at least at higher resolutions. I'm hoping to hit that perfect 144FPS at 1440p in the more graphically intense games which looks to be very reasonable given the 4k performance shown off. Hopefully we see similar gains in other titles, I have my hopes up. 

TheGameKiller_12

Recently bought a 1660 ti gaming x not sure if it will be a good idea to return it and get the rtx 3070. Any suggestions? Or maybe wait a while before returning it.

TSTonyV

TheGameKiller_12 said:

Recently bought a 1660 ti gaming x not sure if it will be a good idea to return it and get the rtx 3070. Any suggestions?

The 3070 is quite a bit more expensive than the 1660ti, they're in different price/performance tiers. 

That said, what I do expect to happen is the current gen cards to change pricing, and we may see some of the cards drop down closer to the current 1660ti price tier that were previously much more expensive. Our cards have a 30-day return period

TheGameKiller_12

I see so it will be best to just keep the card I have instead of spending the extra money for the 3070? My pc is able to watch 8k videos, I have 16gb ddr4 3200, gtx 1660ti gaming x, m.2 1tb, 650 psu, and a ryzen 5 3600 with a asus B450-F rog strix