By this point, you'll be acutely aware of how excruciatingly difficult it is to buy a graphics card, especially trying to find something like Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 at MSRP, which is like grabbing liquid silicon It's like grabbing liquid silicon. Yes, the current state of PC building is in tatters, but EVGA is doing its best to offer hope for those who remain loyal to the manufacturer.

Basically, the company has decided to reward customer loyalty and involvement by offering exclusive access to new hardware releases, a slight discount, and perhaps even more excitingly, the possibility of pocket change. The only catch is that you must have purchased two qualifying EVGA products in the past 12 months or be an active participant in the EVGA community.

To qualify for elite membership through community involvement, in this example, one must watch enough EVGA Twitch streams to accumulate 5,000 e-points or make 100 posts on the EVGA forums.

According to the EVGA Elite page, "As an Elite Member, you will enjoy exclusive access to all new EVGA products all day long. All EVGA Elite Members can now purchase or enter the queue system for the first 24 hours after a new product is launched!"

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In addition, Elite Members will have access to exclusive deals that can be found on the Elite Savings page of the site. Naturally, this list does not include GPUs, but it does include some decent PSUs, GPU and CPU cooling solutions, and some nifty streaming kits. You won't be going to the store to buy one of these for this discount. But if this is your only chance to get the RTX 3080 Ti when May rolls around, you may have to take advantage of it.

But in addition to limited pre-launch access, there is another potential benefit for Elite members.

Through the EVGA Associate Program, they can now earn a portion of their referred customers' earnings. Once you sign up for Elite, simply share the code with someone who wants to buy EVGA gear, and you will receive EVGA Bucks when they make a purchase.

This is good news for those who are already part of the club and want to spend their earnings exclusively in the EVGA store, but those who have not yet qualified have some work to do. At the very least, this is a pretty good way for EVGA to give fans a helping hand in one of the many ways the world is trying to address the GPU shortage.