With the release of the 3070 it is done: Nvidia released all announced RTX 3000 cards. Cards with an excellent price - on paper - and with a higher performance than the old flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti. That’s even true for the cheapest of the three, the RTX 3070, a card that is supposed to cost $500 or 500€.
But: Despite the official release at the end of last month the cards are not really available. You can not even pre-order the 3070 at nvidia.de:
It’s marked as not available.
And this is the warning the german shop caseking shows:
Which says they do not accept preorders until they know more about when the cards will really arrive.
Not even accepting pre-orders is something I do not remember having seen for officially listed cards, outside of the crypto bubbles. The partner cards by Gigabyte etc are also more expensive, starting close to 600€ and going over 700€. I take this as a sign that supply of the other RTX 3000 cards was very low and they are concerned the same will happen with the 3070 variants.
That would be a pity, because the performance of the 3070 is excellent:
And that while using a lot less energy than the RTX 3080.
Reviews match this positive impression of the card itself, but they also voice concern about the supply situation. Computerbase writes (in German):
With that [performance] the GeForce RTX 3070 is a very good graphics card for WQHD, one that in every game reaches high framerates at max settings. … At 500€ - if the card really is available now for that price at a sufficient supply level - there is no competition.
And TechSpot writes:
Compared to the GPU it is replacing, the GeForce RTX 3070 is nearly 40% faster than the 2070 Super. Now, it’s going to be extremely important that Nvidia addresses supply and makes sure those base models hit the MSRP.
And finally TechPowerUp:
NVIDIA has done it again—their new GeForce RTX 3070 is impressive, not only in terms of performance, but also pricing. Just a few weeks ago, we reviewed the GeForce RTX 3080, which finally makes 4K gaming work perfectly. Today, we have the RTX 3070 Founders Edition, which achieves the same for 1440p gamers. … Let’s hope there is more RTX 3070 supply than RTX 3080 because the RTX 3070 is going to fly off the shelves, no doubt.
For pc-kombo this means we wait. While I’d like to recommend those new cards, the recommender can not do so when they are not available, it will fall back to older cards that are in stock. So we wait for the supply situation to change (which will be automatically detected). Or for AMD to release their Radeon 6000 series, hoping that those will match the new RTX cards in performance and will be available in meaningful quantities.