Finish off the deals madness by dropping £1,699 on this PNY RTX 3090 in stock today
There's no way this could be considered a 'deal' but at least you can buy it.
Sit down. Grab a stiff drink. Scan has a GeForce RTX 3090 for sale. No, really. It's not a bargain, or anything like that, but these cards have been hen's teeth-rare for so long, that I thought you should know that you can finally buy one.
Not that I'd recommend buying this one. At least not if you're a normal gamer.
The thing is, the Nvidia RTX 3090 is not really intended for gamers. It's for the guys and gals that make games, films, and animations instead. That huge 24GB framebuffer is golden for them, whereas it's complete overkill for us. At least it is for now and for the foreseeable future.
PNY GeForce RTX 3090 24GB XLR8 | £1,699.99 at Scan
If you play games but also do some serious 3D rendering, then this may be worth considering. That huge 24GB frame buffer means that you can manipulate large 3D models in ways that the RTX 3080 simply can't. This PNY version has the same clocks as Nvidia's Founders Edition, but has a more-traditional triple-fan cooler to help keep it cool. It also costs £200 more.
Now the more cynical part of my brain (which to be fair holds court most of the time), suggests that the RTX 3090 filtering back into stock first is a marketing move to try and sell these overpriced cards. And this one is £200 more than the Founders Edition, but is essentially clocked the same as Nvidia's version of the card, albeit with a traditional triple-fan cooler.
The more charitable view would be that this is just the newer PNY stock landing first, a card that might not have dropped around launch. Who knows, if we're feeling really optimistic, this could just be a sign that the other cards are on the way, and we're about to get Christmas early with fresh stocks of both RTX 3080 and RTX 3070, you know, if Christmas for you involves dropping a big wedge on a high-end graphics card.
So rejoice, for while you may not be in the market for a £1,699 graphics card (and gratz if you are), this may be the sign of more on the way. They'll just have a few pre-orders to get through before you can actually buy an RTX 3080...
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Alan has been writing about PC tech since before 3D graphics cards existed, and still vividly recalls having to fight with MS-DOS just to get games to load. He fondly remembers the killer combo of a Matrox Millenium and 3dfx Voodoo, and seeing Lara Croft in 3D for the first time. He's very glad hardware has advanced as much as it has though, and is particularly happy when putting the latest M.2 NVMe SSDs, AMD processors, and laptops through their paces. He has a long-lasting Magic: The Gathering obsession but limits this to MTG Arena these days.
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