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.Tom's Hardware reported on: "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."


Commenting on the footage (presented above): "two Chinese visitors were interviewed in a news clip, starting at 1.03 minutes. 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." Additionally, according to social media sources in Japan—they reckon that: "some of the unruly crowd at PC Studio's RTX 5090 and 5080 lotto event day in Akihabara, Tokyo were from China."