Just a week after the store-only launch of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, Best Buy appears to be going back on its promise to get people together during a pandemic. Either that, or they believe they have enough stock of the new GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics cards to make them available in quantities that can be sold online again.

It seemed an odd release last week when the exclusive Nvidia Founders Edition retailer made the new high-end cards available for purchase in stores. However, when it comes to the RTX 3080 Ti, Best Buy opted not to sell it online. This was at least one way to ensure that non-entity bots could not get their coded claws into the new GeForce GPUs before us gamers.

I must say that this strategy was really only employed because there were precious few Founders Edition cards available at launch. In fact, only certain Best Buy stores were allocated the new GPUs.

"Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition graphics card will be available in limited quantities only at select Best Buy stores on Thursday, June 3," the company said in a post. Sure sounds like "not enough," but are there really enough of them?

However, we spoke to Best Buy today, and it appears that the current listing for the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition is indeed correct in that it will be "online only."

That means that when this new card goes on sale tomorrow at 9:00 AM, it will be a free-for-all for everyone, including bots... And will probably be out of stock at 9:03 AM. That said, I know an actual person who got an RTX 3080 Ti FE in the UK.

Strange, isn't it?

Given the huge demand for graphics cards that some manufacturers and retailers are making money off of, it's hard to parse out retail prices at this point, but at least a third-party Nvidia Founders Edition card with the same MSRP of around $599 as the reference A third-party variant should be available at launch.

We have heard that four cards from Gigabyte, Palit, Zotac, and Asus will be available alongside the Founders Edition cards at a UK RRP of £529. Keep an eye out for the possibility that they will be available at MSRP in the US as well:

We were not overwhelmed by the RTX 3070 Ti offering, especially not compared to the almost mythical Radeon RX 6800, but a new GPU that is close to MSRP in this card shortage era. If you can get your hands on one, whichever one you choose will do well.

Well, unless we are talking about the nightmarish $220 bright pink RX 550. No matter how pretty it is, no one will do well with that card.