Everyone was busy, trying to get their hands on an RTX 3080 but there wasn’t a sufficient supply, unfortunately. Matters worsened when at least one of Nvidia’s add-in board (AIB) partners accepted more orders than their inventory; eventually, they had to cancel some.
That partner was Zotac. They explained in a now-deleted Twitter post (according to Videocardz) that due to an unknown error they had accepted around 20000 orders of the GeForce RTX 3080 Trinity model.
Almost 20,000 pre-orders have been received and, with the best of intentions, we cannot serve them in a short time, as much as we wanted. So again: We are infinitely sorry, but we also don’t know what went wrong here.
— ZOTAC on Twitter (now removed)
Another probable cause of this mistake might be the pre-order sales from Amazon in Germany; hence it is not clear whether the mistake was from Zotac’s or Amazon.
On the other hand, some reviews discovered that the GeForce RTX 3080 is 2-3% slower than the NVIDIA’s Founders Edition SKU. Zotac’s representative initially explained the cause on a Reddit thread. According to him, it is done to separate the high-end models from the basic Trinity models.
Once the thread blew up, the rep changed his statement and said that we are not aware of the cause. However, we have been told that the 3080 Trinity is outperforming the FE in many tests.
If you are willing to get your hands on the RTX 3080, you will have to wait until things settle down. We are expecting a similar response when the RTX 3090 and GeForce RTX 3070 launch to retails this week and next month respectively.
Via Videocardz