A South Korea-based hardware enthusiast—Harukaze5719—has discovered a curious listing of ZOTAC's GeForce RTX 5090 SOLID OC model on a Chinese auction site (asking price: ~$4175 USD). This finding was shared with their audience, via a social media post—a screenshot was accompanied by harukaze5719's short and succinct message: "OMG..." Officially, NVIDIA and its board partners cater to the Chinese hardware market with a restricted variant of the flagship "Blackwell" GPU—GeForce RTX 5090D. Despite under-the-hood nerfing, this region-exclusive model still offers enviable performance (when pushed).

The "full fat" GeForce RTX 5090 GPU appears to be an even hotter commodity—with demand (at launch) exceeding far exceeding supply. ZOTAC's South Korean branch warned potential customers about difficult conditions almost two weeks ahead of Blackwell's market debut on January 30. Harukaze5719 has likely expressed semi-personal frustration over apparent South Korea market-destined ZOTAC stock turning up for sale in China. So-called "Chinese GPU shopping tourists" could have made the journey to a South Korean PC hardware store, with their sole objective being the acquisition of GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards. Tom's Hardware has gathered various related tidbits from Japanese and Taiwanese news sources—where local TV coverage explored the events of last week's launch event.

Late last month, NVIDIA claimed that 16-pin power connector issues were a thing of the past. The controversial 12VHPWR connection standard has fueled many online debates—prompting investigations from several prominent press outlets. Following NVIDIA's latest "safety" declaration—likely by coincidence—PCM Hong Kong reported another melting incident, affecting two cables and a power supply unit. The publication's hardware reviewer was recently engaged in the "full-load" testing of GeForce RTX 5090D and RTX 5080 graphics cards. Last week's evaluation session was interrupted by notable test system instabilities—upon downing tools, the PCM staffer discovered that their 1200 W PSU had given up the ghost. Additionally, two 16-pin cables had melted at both ends—initial detective work pointed to a GeForce RTX 4090 sample card being the main culprit.

VideoCardz and UNIKO's Hardware kept close tabs on PCM's next steps—online interactions, over the past weekend, spurred a re-evaluation of circumstances. According to PCM's latest update, they noticed burn marks on the GeForce RTX 4090 test unit—the two GeForce RTX-50-series cards did not exhibit any physical damage. Post-analysis, the reviewer now suspects that an SSD failure could be the route cause. They were happy to report that all involved RTX cards have survived, and that their test platform has been re-equipped with 12V-2x6 cables. An amended VideoCardz article proposes that everything came down to a simple human error.

According to widespread user reports from Chinese tech forums and Reddit communities, multiple RTX 5090 and 5090D graphics cards are failing permanently after standard driver installation. The issue affects both the standard RTX 5090 and the export-modified 5090D variant released for the Chinese market on January 30th. Users report consistent failure patterns: upon initial driver installation, displays go dark, and systems permanently lose the ability to detect the GPU through both DisplayPort and HDMI interfaces. Hardware failures have been documented across multiple board partners, with Colorful, Manli, and Gigabyte cards showing identical symptoms. Third-party vendor reports sometimes indicate potential IC burn damage, suggesting hardware-level failure rather than recoverable software issues.

Some investigations point to PCIe Gen 5 implementation as a possible root cause. The RTX 5090 series represents NVIDIA's first fully Gen 5-compliant GPU architecture, introducing new signal integrity challenges. Some users report temporary mitigation by forcing PCIe 4.0 mode in BIOS settings, though this workaround remains unverified. Additional complications arise from modern motherboard designs that share PCIe lanes between M.2 storage and graphics slots. The failure pattern appears consistent across both domestic and international markets. On r/ASUS, users report identical detection failures persisting through CMOS resets and system rebuilds. Chinese forum documentation shows systematic failures across multiple board partner implementations, suggesting a fundamental architecture or driver compatibility issue rather than isolated manufacturing defects. NVIDIA has not issued official guidance on the failures.Below are screenshots of the reported user problems:

Yes, the title is correct. One of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5090D "China" edition GPUs, not the regular RTX 5090, managed to run at 3.4 GHz under liquid nitrogen. With a staggering 575 W default TDP, Tony Yu, ASUS China's general manager, has performed physical modifications that allow the card to run up to 1000 W TDP. The RTX 5090D is a China-exclusive variant with virtually no difference from the regular RTX 5090, just limited general AI capability due to US export regulations. ASUS China used its top-end Astral OC variant for this stunt, which, as we proved in our review of the regular ASUS RTX 5090 Astral OC, has some pretty good chip binning, allowing the card to reach the highest overclock. We pushed the regular RTX 5090 Astral OC GPU on air to 3086 MHz, a +277 MHz over the stock boost setting. However, the RTX 5090D equivalent under LN2 manages to reach 3,390 MHz at peak loads, which is a +581 MHz difference.

For memory, the overclock is equally impressive with 34 Gbps. Regarding performance, the LN2-overclocked RTX 5090D surpassed stock performance by approximately 16%. During benchmark tests, the GPU outperformed multiple previous-generation graphics cards, including a dual RTX 3090 Ti configuration in Port Royal and a quad GTX 1080 Ti setup in Fire Strike. Power consumption figures indicate that 1,760 W was used in total for a rig with ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090D, which is paired with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D on the ASUS ROG X870E Hero motherboard. This roughly yields a 1,000 W power consumption by the card, which has seen its PCB get physical modifications to output such high power.

NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce RTX 50-series is expected to make a debut during the CES 2025 show in January. However, NVIDIA serves a lot of markets, and its significant presence is also recorded in the Chinese market as well. Hence, the company has prepared its "Dragon" version of the top-of-the-line GPU versions for Chinese gamers, complying with export regulations that forbid Chinese entities from acquiring GPUs powerful enough to train AI models. NVIDIA appears to be developing "D" variants for both RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 cards, but we only have the confirmation for the GeForce RTX 5090D so far, thanks to MEGAsizeGPU. However, a new leak from the Chinese Chiphell forum points to RTX5090D having the same hardware specification as the regular RTX 5090.

In the last generation, RTX 4090 and RTX 4090D were different, with the RTX 4090D having lower TGP and core count. However, this time around, NVIDIA will physically leave the same expected GB202 "Blackwell" die with CUDA core count and memory, only to lock certain features through firmware. Since the primary goal of export regulations the US is imposing is slowing down Chinese access to GPUs powerful enough to train and inference AI models, we expect to see the RTX 5090D with reduced Tensor core capability and maybe a lowered frequency of the overall chip. This could limit some applications from using these Tensor cores for inference, while NVIDIA's AI features like DLSS could also be a bit slowed down. NVIDIA may find a way to allow DLSS and other gaming-related technologies to operate normally while other general-purpose AI tasks are limited. Readers may recall Low Hash Rate (LHR) cards during the crypto mining boom, which had a similar firmware lock to cap mining hash rate.