I'm convinced that some 11-year-olds are the smartest people on earth. Hear me out, okay? While adults have all these probabilities that they have to work out for whether we think it's likely or not we can achieve something, kids often just do something anyway and see what happens, and for one pre-teen in Florida, it resulted in him bypassing a lottery so he and his dad could get their hands on a 3090 GPU.
We've talked at length about how difficult it is to get your hands on the latest generation of GPUs. The 30 series GPUs especially have been some of the most unobtainable pieces of tech on the market and when some do appear here and there, lotteries are often held to make sure all the products aren't been snapped up by scalpers.
PCs are pretty huge sometimes which is why we're excited to see how Valve's new Steam Deck performs...
As reported by PC Gamer and PCMag there is one 11-year-old, however, who worked out how to bypass one such system altogether, securing a shiny RTX 3090 for his family and this is how he did it.
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Newegg, as you may well be aware, is a huge tech retailer and one of the places you're most likely to find 30 series GPUs at the moment. To try and make the system as fair as possible for consumers Newegg has implemented a lottery for people to enter to get the chance to buy an RTX 3090. So, in theory, the 3090 was in stock during the lottery, right?
Well, Newegg also has a "Build Your PC" feature on the site too, allowing people to purchase all the different components you'd need for a custom PC. When ordering a build, the components appear in your basket separately, including the 3090. And that's where Ricardo Santana Jr. thought to delete all of the other components and just check out with the GPU, securing his family an EVGA RTX 3090 with no problem. Smart.
Newegg has since closed this loophole and assures users that a minimal number of GPUs were purchased in this way before the company fixed the issue. In an interview with PCMag about the loophole, Ricardo's dad says: "I thought about purchasing more, but don't want to abuse it, and would like to give other people the opportunity. I'm thinking that they (Newegg) are prioritizing selling custom builds with the inventory they have for the Shuffle. I'm not sure exactly how many people are winning the Shuffle but I tried the Shuffle so many times and never won. It's terrible that we have to go to this extent to be able to obtain these cards."
Featured Image Credit: Ricardo Santana / NvidiaTopics: News