Recently, a theft took place at an esports hotel in China. Several young guests stole Ryzen 9 9800X3D processors and RTX 5070 graphics cards from multiple gaming PCs along with several gaming mice before checking out. The hotel owner has filed a police report. Translation of the audio in comment. from r/pcmasterrace
While the concept of an esports hotel might be totally alien to US and European gamers, they’re hugely popular in China, with millions of customers enjoying day-long gaming sessions on high-end PCs in comfort. But for a couple of ‘guests’ at one hotel, it wasn’t a gaming holiday they were after—they helped themselves to the expensive CPU and graphics card in the rigs.
That’s according to a post on Reddit by user Zestyclose-Salad-290, where video footage from the hotel’s owner shows several gaming PCs semi-disassembled, and free of their central processor and GPU. The guests—sorry, thieves—brought tools with them to remove a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and GeForce RTX 5070 from three or four gaming rigs; they also left with some Logitech keyboards, but left everything else behind.
Zestyclose-Salad-290 provides a rough translation of the hotel owner’s commentary in the video: “Oh my god, the guys who checked in a few days ago just left. I messaged them on WeChat asking if they’d broken anything, only to find they’d blocked me. Right then, I knew something was wrong.”
“I rushed upstairs to check and everything was gone. The 9800X3D and 5070… OMG. Even Logitech GPW was stolen. But they didn’t take the RAM sticks… maybe they didn’t know how to remove them? They even had to buy a screwdriver on the spot!”
Given how cleanly everything has been removed, the thieves clearly knew exactly what they were looking to take and how to do so without damaging anything. I suspect that the hotel advertises the specifications of the PCs it offers in the rooms, and given how expensive 9800X3Ds and 5070s are, the robbery was certainly planned, rather than being an opportunistic smash-and-grab.
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I must confess to not knowing a huge amount about China’s esports hotel industry, so I can’t tell if this type of crime is common or not, nor can I tell if hotel owners are able to get insurance against such problems. However, minor thefts are practically the norm in all hotels, as guests frequently help themselves to towels, bath robes, and toiletries. It’s not unusual for people to walk off with coffee machines or even mattresses, for that matter.
It’s a little hard to pin down the average price for a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and GeForce RTX 5070 in China, and bulk purchases will almost certainly result in lower prices, but if one was starting an esports hotel in the US, for example, you’d be looking at spending $450 at Amazon for the CPU and $610 at Newegg for the graphics card.
Add that up and multiply by four, and if it’s your hotel that’s just been robbed, you’ve just lost equipment worth over $4,200. No matter how large the hotel is, that’s a substantial loss, and I can only imagine just how distraught the owner is in this particular crime.
I suspect that he’ll be looking at having some kind of security cages installed around the gaming rigs to prevent this from occurring again, but that won’t come cheap, nor will replacing the stolen parts. For every nice thing we can enjoy in this world, there’s always someone out there to ruin it.
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