Korean retail RTX 5090 spotted for sale in China — Chinese shoppers plunder Japan and Taiwan, too

Yahoo

05-02-2025

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
A clearly Korea-sourced Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card has been spotted for sale on an online Chinese marketplace. Korean PC tech fan @Harukaze5719 highlighted the listing and seemed exasperated by its presence. Perhaps the 'OMG' was due to the difficulty in obtaining one of these new Nvidia graphics cards in South Korea.
We are pretty sure this Korean product in the China marketplace won't be an isolated case. Earlier in the week we saw comments that some of the chaotic crowd at the PC Studio Akihabara store had visited from China. Moreover, Taiwan's computer stores were similarly targeted by folk who had flown in from China for the RTX 50 release day.
Above you can see the headlining Chinese reseller listing, featuring a Zotac-branded GeForce RTX 5090 Solid OC graphics card. A yellow and black sticker on the box highlights the three-year warranty and other details in Korean text.
We have no way of knowing how the China marketplace seller got hold of this RTX 5090 – a SKU that isn't available in China, where the RTX 5090D is the halo product. We can only speculate that the seller recently traveled to South Korea (or knows someone who did) for a shopping trip.
You might also be interested to know that the Chinese Yuan asking price is equivalent to approximately US$4,175 at the current exchange rate. Nevertheless, this card may have already been sold...
Evidence that Chinese citizens visited Taiwan's computer malls to pick up some freshly launched Nvidia RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 graphics cards seems much stronger.
On Friday, January 31, Taiwan's SET News channel reported from the long queues outside a computer mall in the high-tech country. Some people had waited for days, with beds and chairs in evidence outside.
In Taiwan, RTX 5090 retail pricing ranges from approx NT72,000 to NT$90,000 (from approx US$2,200 including tax). However, the buyers from China talked about sellers on the mainland asking for the equivalent of NT$200,000 or more for an RTX 5090 card.
Two Chinese visitors were interviewed in the above news clip, starting at 1.03mins. The first one said he arrived the day before and didn't want a cut-down RTX 5090D. The second visitor said he didn't want to pay China scalper prices (double or more), and thought he had a chance to get an RTX 5090 at retail price in Taiwan.
The chances of buying an RTX 5090 on the night were pretty low, though. According to a map shared by SET (embedded below), Taipei and surrounding regions only had 20 RTX 5090 cards for the customers queuing up, with 30 more for pre-orders. Central and South-Western cities had even tighter supplies, with just four – yes four – cards available when the doors opened, and 30 available for pre-order. RTX 5080 cards were rather more plentiful, but still far from sufficient.
In the intro, we mentioned another country that isn't very far from China, which may have had some graphics card tourists fly over recently. Suspicions that some of the unruly crowd at PC Studio's RTX 5090 and 5080 lotto event day in Akihabara, Tokyo were from China were raised on several social media platforms.
Knowing that sites like X are prone to unaccountable troublesome trolls, we hope tech sites like IT Media, which wrote "the number of purchasers who seemed to be Chinese was flooded" (machine translation), have better sources.