ASUS ROG Adds A Lottery System To Score An Elusive RTX 5090 Or 5080
It's been almost a month since the GeForce RTX 5090 and GeForce RTX 5080 landed on retail shelves, both of which sold out in all of a nanosecond (or at least it felt that way). In the days and weeks since, multiple retailers and add-in board (AIB) partners have implemented systems designed to get limited restocks in the hands of gamers rather than scalpers, including NVIDIA itself with the return of its Verified Priority Access program. Now ASUS ROG is getting in on the action.
Most of the restock strategies designed to bypass scalpers have relied on some kind of lottery or raffle system, whereby anyone lucky enough to be chosen will be given the opportunity to play MSRP for a high-demand graphics card. And so it goes with ASUS.
In a post on Facebook, the official ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) account announced a raffle exclusive to ROG Elite Rewards members. The good news here is that you don't have to already be an Elite Rewards member to participate—you can sign up now (it's free) and then toss your name into the virtual hat. Just follow these steps...
- Sign up to become an ROG Elite Rewards if you're not already a member.
- Head to the raffle page and select which GPU you're interested in (you can choose both).
The two GPUs up for grabs include the ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 5090 and ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5080. It's a little curious that the 5090 isn't being offered in ROG trim, this being an ROG promotion and all. However, given where MSRPs stand these days, the TUF Gaming variant is hundreds of dollars less, so that's probably why it was chosen for the raffle.
You get one entry for selecting which GPU (or both GPUs) you want to buy, and a second entry for providing your ROG Elite Rewards username (your email, essentially). Then you sit back and wait.
It sounds nice in theory, though in practice, this and other lottery/raffle systems are basically band-aids on the larger issue of not enough units to meet demand. ASUS doesn't specify how many models it will earmark for its raffle, but we can't imagine it's a significant number. That said, in addition to the presumed randomness of the raffle selection, ASUS said it will also be "reaching out directly to select top-tier ROG Elite Rewards members of exclusive purchase access."
The glass-half-full vantage point is that hey, at least it's something. If you're brand agnostic, you can also check out Zotac's Discord and Newegg's Shuffle programs, both of which are aimed at thwarting scalpers. And there's NVIDIA's program mentioned up top.
Outside of these raffle systems, the other option to get your hands on a card (outside of feeding greedy scalpers) is to sit back and wait for restocks, with supply supposedly getting a big boost in the not-too-distant future. We'll see.
