Demand for Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards is so strong that a retailer is selling a faulty version of the GPU with missing ROPs, and still charging an astronomical price for it. A Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 Solid OC is currently listed as B-Stock at German etailer Alternate, with the listing clearly stating that the GPU doesn’t have all of its render outputs (ROPs) enabled, but the price is still €2,899, which works out at $2,625 once you remove VAT and perform a straight currency conversion.
While the RTX 5090 offers incredible gaming performance, making it the best graphics card you can buy right now, this Nvidia GPU’s MSRP is already high at $1,999, and the more realistic price is much higher. The fact that a Zotac card with missing ROPs is knowingly being sold for $2,625 just shows how little supply of the new cards is available to meet demand right now.
The card’s listing on Alternate was recently spotted by Videocardz, and it clearly states that “only 168 ROPs are enabled” in the product description. The RTX 5090 is supposed to have 176 ROPs, meaning this card will have compromised gaming performance.
ROP either stands for render output or raster operation pipeline, depending on who you ask, and the term refers to the blocks in the final stage of the graphics pipeline, when all the shading work has already been done by the GPU, pushing all the final pixel data to your card’s memory, and taking care of a few other bits of pixel processing, including anti-aliasing. The more ROPs in your GPU, the quicker it can churn out your gaming visuals, relieving any potential bottleneck at the end of the pipeline.
Nvidia has already admitted that there are some RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070 Ti GPUs with missing ROPs, saying that the issue affects less than 0.5% of GPUs, with an “average graphical performance impact” of 4%. The latter is a significant number if you’re paying $2,625 to get the fastest GPU performance possible, though, especially when fully-enabled versions of the card are listed at the same retailer for €2,799 ($2,547 ex tax). The problem is that none of those fully-enabled GPUs are in stock, whereas the faulty one with fewer ROPs enabled is available to buy right now.
With Zotac RTX 5090 prices recently climbing by up to 20%, costing $2,999 for the top model and $2,699 for the aforementioned Solid OC version, it looks as though Alternate thinks it can still get a silly amount of money for the card, even though it’s faulty, simply because it has it in stock.
Let’s hope this outlandish pricing and short supply comes to an end sooner rather than later. As I found in my RTX 5090 review, this card is already overpriced at $1,999, even if it is incredibly fast – we really shouldn’t be expected to pay these sorts of prices for cards that don’t even have all their parts enabled. Check out our RTX 5090 stock page to see where you may be able to find stock of this GPU now, if you’re lucky.
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