AMD has been selling reference-style Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards via its Direct store for nearly a year now, but many would-be customers have yet hold one. Aside from overwhelming demand from real people, bots have been largely to blame for the sold out status of graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia. It’s hard to compete with a machine in the race for checkout. But retailers have devised more creative methods to to sell graphics cards in order to get them directly into the hands of end consumers instead of scalpers or minors.
EVGA introduced a queue system last year after it immediately became clear that demand greatly outweighed supply. This method was met with an overwhelming response from consumers, and has definitely been a positive PR move for the AIB. While somewhat of a delayed response, it seems AMD is finally ready to adopt a similar system in order to mitigate issues and improve its customer experience. If you enter the AMD Direct Store when it just so happens to have stock available for its Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards, you’ll now be able to queue.
This discovery originally appeared on Reddit, which was picked up on by Tom’s Hardware. The media outlet quickly confirmed that the system is real. They managed to enter the store after a relatively short queue before it was quickly overwhelmed by everyone else that caught wind of the opportunity. The way the system works is that you can get your place in line and begin to receive availability updates. This way, you’ll know if the wait is in vain and be able to drop out if availability depletes. Unfortunately, some models may sell out by the time you get into the store. Hope you don’t mind a 6700 XT versus a 6900 XT, or vice versa.
We’d assume customers will only have limited time windows to make a purchase once in the store. There is still a limit of one sale per household, too.
Events apparently begin at 9:00 AM CDT.
Thursdays are the current bet
This system has reportedly been in place for the past two weeks now and is active each Thursday morning. While AMD has not commented on this change to its Direct Store availability model, it appears this will be the way things work moving forward. It’s certainly an improvement to the randomized drops that allowed bots to scoop up graphics cards instantly at odd hours.
