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Evetech’s higher ASUS RTX 3080 series pricing explained

To say Nvidia’s launch of the RTX 3080 GPUs has been ham-fisted is the understatement of the century.

While locally you might not have seen as big of an issue, in the US the RTX 3080 series release was marred by bots buying up available cards for resale and exorbitant prices.

Locally we’re still awaiting word on when we can expect these cards but there are some oddities we need to address.

This morning Raru listed an ASUS TUF Gaming OC GeForce RTX 3080 10GB GDDR6X series GPU for R20 519. Meanwhile, Evetech had the same card listed for R21 399.

Evetech Pricing as it appeared on Friday morning.

That’s a rather big difference for what is the exact same card. We’re used to pricing discrepancies but for launch, this was just weird.

Puzzled by this we fired an email off to Evetech and received a response instead from ASUS South Africa’s business development manager, Azin Alikhani. Thankfully, ASUS was able to clear things up.

As it turns out, South Africa is not immune to the aforementioned troubled launch of the RTX 3080 GPUs and the pricing on Evetech’s website for ASUS cards was vastly different to pricing for MSI cards from other retailers because, well, it comes down to somebody forgetting to copy Evetech into a mail.

“For this specific launch there were many discussions regarding pricing structures in different locations in the world. For South Africa especially, this product is still not available yet and can only be purchased as ‘pre order’,” Alikhani explained to Hypertext via email.

“Of course due to shortage, allocation and shipping all influenced by COVID-19 all brands including ASUS, could not have an accurate estimation on end-user prices.”

To clarify, the pricing listed on Evetech’s website before today was provided by ASUS.

The good news is that in some instances, prices may come down.

“Getting closer to the delivery date we managed to estimate more accurately for all the topics involved resulting in us sending updated pricing to our partners. Unfortunately, due to some internal miscommunication Evetech was informed of these updated prices later than other partners. This should never have happened and we take full responsibility for this oversight,” said Alikhani.

We can see that in effect right now with Evetech’s pricing now coming closer to Raru’s with the ASUS TUF Gaming OC GeForce RTX 3080 10GB GDDR6X now listed for R20 399 – this is well below Raru’s pricing.

The only other brand being advertised by Evetech (at least for the RTX 3080 series) is MSI and there Evetech’s pricing is again more favourable than Raru.

While the pricing difference was not particularly egregious (what is R800 among friends) we’re glad that there was a reason for this other than “one retailer has a higher markup than the other” and that the problem has been rectified.

Unfortunately this launch has been a comedy of errors. Let’s hope AMD can do better come October.

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