'I brought my camping chair and blanket': Hundreds line up at SF Best Buy for PC graphic card
"It's worth it. It's a good feeling, I made it to my destination," said one customer who came from San Jose to buy the card.
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- More than 200 people lined up at San Francisco's Best Buy store for the chance to buy the RTX 30-series graphic cards by Nvidia, which went on sale Tuesday morning with little notice.
The line started forming Monday morning. The card went on sale at 8 a.m. Tuesday.
"I brought my camping chair and blanket. Um, honestly, I have never camped out for a product before," Kevin Chow, of San Francisco, said Tuesday morning.
He said it was an impulse decision to wait in line for the card, thought he is not sure he would do it again.
RELATED: Unopened Super Mario 64 game from 1996 sells for $1.56M
"I can't say I really recommend it. But I have been trying to get this graphics card for three months now. I was just tired of waiting with nothing happening," Chow said.
He said it was a cold night in foggy San Francisco.
"I am wearing two to four layers. Honestly I could have used more," he said.
But as the doors opened at 8 a.m. Tuesday morning, many of the gamers forgot the pain and focused on the prize.
"It's worth it. It's a good feeling, I made it to my destination," Andrew Ricardez, of San Jose, said jubilantly as he headed toward the door.
VIDEO: Bay Area man waits 36 hours to buy new PS5 on Black Friday
Gamers say the card will improve their video playing experience.
"It's faster and has better graphics," Ricardez said.
"So many more games and performance! You get a lot better performance with this card. There are so many games, like Cyber Punk. I had such a bad card you couldn't play it on my system. Now I have a great card and can play basically everything," Matt Decambra of Fremont, said while clutching his new card.
He was one of the first to line up Monday morning.
Best Buy sold one card per person to try and prevent scalpers from hording the cards for the resale market. As customers made the big purchase, they told ABC7 News they do not plan on reselling them.
RELATED: Best Buy lays off 5,000 workers and plans to close more stores
"I'm going to keep it. It's so hard to get a card nowadays. You have all these bots and people snagging all these cards. This is like a gold ticket. I don't want to let it go. It's going straight to my computer," Decambra said.
The models of cards range in price from $500 to $1500. Only a few select stores had them Tuesday morning.
The San Francisco store sold out by 10 a.m. and there is no word on when the store will get more cards.
Customers said they only got word about this supply a couple of days ago.
