A modified GeForce RTX 5090 96GB card is now listed on Alibaba for $3,888, roughly 35% less than a standard RTX 5090 currently sells for in the US, despite carrying three times the 32GB of memory Nvidia ships on the retail card. The listing comes from Shenzhen Suqiao Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd, a Chinese OEM/ODM with more than a decade of experience building graphics cards, motherboards and servers, rather than an anonymous reseller.
We covered Nvidia’s own approach to 50-series pricing just last week, when the company sold RTX 50-series GPUs at MSRP at PAX West. This listing sits at the opposite end of that story: a Chinese workshop tripling the memory on Nvidia’s flagship gaming card and selling the result for less than Nvidia charges for the unmodified original, let alone anything from its professional lineup.
How a 96GB RTX 5090 gets built
Suqiao’s card almost certainly relies on clamshell memory: a custom PCB with GDDR7 modules mounted on both sides of the board to double the capacity a normal layout allows. That is the same technique Nvidia uses on its own workstation cards. The GPU die itself is likely harvested from existing RTX 5090 units, reballed onto the new board and run on leaked or modified firmware, the same method Chinese workshops used earlier to push the RTX 4090 to 48GB. It follows a pattern of memory-doubled cards out of Chinese factories, including a 32GB RTX 5080 and a 48GB RTX 3090, mostly built to let gaming silicon serve AI inference workloads where VRAM capacity matters more than raw shader throughput.
Nvidia’s own RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell uses the same GB202 die as the RTX 5090 and already ships with 96GB of GDDR7, which is presumably where the idea for this card came from. TechPowerUp notes that card starts at $16,000, so even a dubious clamshell mod at $3,888 undercuts it heavily, though the two are not really comparable: one carries Nvidia’s warranty and driver support, the other does not.
Why the spec sheet doesn’t add up
The Alibaba listing itself raises doubts. It quotes GDDR6X memory running at 14Gbps, and GDDR6X has no place on a Blackwell die, which uses GDDR7 exclusively. That could be a copy-paste error from an older listing template Suqiao reused, or it could hint that the board cannot actually run its full 96GB at genuine Blackwell memory speeds. Either way, the listing is short on hard technical detail beyond capacity and price, which is typical of these Alibaba mod listings but leaves the real-world performance of the card unverified.
It is also worth noting that RTX 5090 owners have already reworked the card’s stock hardware once this year, when modders swapped its 16-pin power connector for three separate 8-pin plugs to deal with connector melting. A memory-doubled clamshell rebuild is a bigger undertaking than a connector swap, and one that depends on a steady supply of harvested RTX 5090 dies to reball.
What to watch
The real test is whether buyers outside China who order this card get one that runs its full 96GB at rated speed, or one throttled by the memory the listing describes. Independent benchmarks, rather than Suqiao’s own spec sheet, will settle that. It is also worth watching whether Nvidia responds to its harvested dies turning up in third-party rebuilds, as it has done with earlier memory-modded 4090 and 3090 cards.
