The RTX 30 Series Restock Nightmare Could Justify Extreme Measures

For a PC gamer in need of an upgrade, life is rough at the moment. Both AMD and NVIDIA have announced and launched new PC hardware, but all of that flashy new silicon is proving exceedingly difficult to find. With Cyberpunk 2077 – which is clearly the most anticipated game of the year for a lot of PC gamers – on the horizon, it might leave some enthusiasts considering what was previously unthinkable.

Yes, brace yourselves, because we're talking about what could be a capital offense in the eyes of the enthusiast PC gaming crowd: buying a pre-built PC. Stop by any PC gaming sub on Reddit – or really any place where PC gamers are bound to gather – and you won't have to search far to find people saying that buying a pre-built is a waste of money when it's so easy to build your own. "It's just like LEGO for adults!" they'll say, which of course assumes that all of the bricks are easy to get at any given moment.

Those PC gamers are right, generally speaking – building a PC yourself is usually less expensive than buying a pre-built PC, and putting it together is not as difficult as it might seem at first. However, with these stock shortages, particularly on RTX 30-series GPUs, all of that sort of goes out the window.

Unless you're willing to come up with a multi-step action plan and devote a ton of time to it, you're likely not going to find one of the new RTX cards in stock without a lot of luck. Even if you do decide to stake out multiple websites and refresh listings for the cards until your eyes are bloodshot and you can't remember the last time you ate, luck is still going to be a big factor in whether or not you get a GPU.

Of course, you could also go the easier route and buy from a site like eBay, where cards like the RTX 3080 are readily available for nearly double their MSRP. That, obviously, is not a realistic option for most PC gamers, and even if you had the bank account to justify buying an RTX 3080 for $1,300 or $1,400, do you really want to support that kind of behavior?

So, with few other options, this could be one of the rare times that buying a pre-built is preferable to waiting for the stock of these new graphics cards to normalize. There have already been several gaming PCs with RTX 30-series cards at their core announced, and while we'll probably see shortages for those pre-builts as well, they're at least an option for obtaining this new tech sooner rather than later.

The good news, at least, is that Cyberpunk 2077 seems to run a rather wide range of PC configurations, so you don't necessarily need the best of the best hardware to play the game. Still, there are a lot of people who have been hyped about this game for nearly a decade at this point, and you can bet that they're going to want to play the game on the best hardware possible. If other components of your PC need an upgrade anyway, a pre-built may look even more tempting.

So, how about it? Are you thinking about buying a pre-built PC instead of waiting for these GPU stock situations to get better? Head down to the comments section and let us know!