RTIt is no secret just how valuable and sought-after the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 is to the realm of AI and opportunists at this point, and there are plenty of horror stories to supplement those reports too. Between the scarcity and eye-gouging price tags, there is now video footage of Chinese factories stripping these cards of their GPU die and GDDR7 memory, further adding insult to injury.
The leaked video comes by way of HKEPC on X, with the original source of the video having already been taken down, indicating to us that it was never meant to see the light of day. In it, you can see how RTX 5090s are stripped of their components: technicians sit at their stations, desoldering the GB202 die and GDDR7 memory chips, before transplanting them onto custom PCBs with dual-slot blower-style coolers. A sign that these newly created GPUs are destined for the AI Server racks.
It’s not a slipshod operation either. You can actually make out the different parts of the factory line: procurement, unboxing and dismantling, desoldering, repurposing, testing and validation, and the repackaging. This is the engine of commerce, albeit one that lay consumers like us will not like.
The worst part of the whole process is probably the procurement stage; these factories gobble up RTX 5090 GPUs from all brands and all models. So, in addition to the cards coming from brand partners like Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI, they are buying the top-tier cards of each respective brand’s lineup as well. Oh, and Founders Edition models are a part of that equation too.
The RTX 5090 is NVIDIA’s current and most powerful Blackwell GPU for the consumer market, second perhaps only to the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Edition. It is also currently worth its weight in gold, retailing well above its original MSRP at an average of RM28,000.
