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Comment by geertj | Hacker News Reader

Any advice on how to buy the founders edition when it launches, possibly from folks who bought the 4090 FE last time around? I have a feeling there will be a lot of demand.

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Getting a 3080 FE (I also had the option to get the 3090 FE) at the height of pandemic demand required me sleeping outside a Best Buy with 50 other random souls on a wednesday night.

At that time I ended up just buying a gaming PC packaged with the card. I find it's generally worth it to upgrade all the components of the system along with the GPU every 3 years or so.

This goes at a significant premium for on average OEM parts that are subpar. Buying individually yields much better results and these days it's less of a hassle than it used to.

It was likely from an integrator not a huge OEM that's spinning their own proprietary motherboard designs like Dell. In that case they only really paid the integrator's margin and lost the choice of their own parts.

Do you live somewhat near a Microcenter? They'll likely have these as in-store pick up only, no online reservations, 1 per customer. Recently got a 9800X3D CPU from them, its nice they're trying to prevent scalping.

I do! Great advice. Going off on a tangent, when I recently visited my Microcenter after a few years of not going there, it totally gave me 80s vibes and I loved it. Staff fit the "computer nerd" stereotype accurately, including jeans shirts and ponytails. And best of all they actually wanted to talk to me and help me find stuff, and were knowledgeable.

Ours just opened in 2024 and I've tried to give them as much business as possible. Ordering everything for a new PC build, sans the AMD CPU, and then doing pick up was a breeze. Feels great that the place is completely packed every time I go in there. I feel like Bestbuy made me sort of hate electronics retail and Microcenter is reminding of what it used to be like going to Radio Shack and Compusa back in their hayday.

I had a similar feeling when going to microcenter for the first time in years a few years ago, but in my case, it was a 90s vibe since I had first visited a computer store in the 90s.

As someone living (near) Seattle, this is a major issue for me every product launch and I don't have a solution.

The area's geography just isn't conducive to allowing a single brick and mortar store to survive and compete with online retail for costs vs volume; but without a B&M store there's no good way to do physical presence anti-scalper tactics.

I can't even get in a purchase opportunity lottery since AMD / Nvidia don't do that sort of thing for allocating restock quota tickets that could be used as tokens to restock product if a purchase is to the correct shipping address.

There is a Discord that sends notifications for stock drops. They are also on X.

https://discord.com/invite/stockdrops

https://x.com/stock_drops?lang=en

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