Unfortunately, that’s the anti-scalper countermeasure. Crippling their crypto mining potential didn’t impact scalping very much, so they increased the price with the RTX 40 series. The RTX 40s were much easier to find than the RTX 30s were, so here we are for the RTX 50s. They’re already on the edge of what people will pay, so they’re less attractive to scalpers. We’ll probably see an initial wave of scalped 3090s for $3500-$4000, then it will drop off after a few months and the market will mostly have un-scalped ones with fancy coolers for $2200-$2500 from Zotac, MSI, Gigabyte, etc.
RROD was actually 3/4ths of a circle. A full red circle was a different and less troubling error.