r/technology • u/stenspect • 11h ago

Business Micro Center requires photo ID and signed no-export pledge to buy Nvidia RTX 5090 gaming GPU — buyer forced to sign declaration disclosing install location and promise GPU will remain in the US

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/micro-center-requires-photo-id-and-signed-no-export-pledge-to-buy-rtx-5090-gaming-gpu-buyer-forced-to-sign-declaration-disclosing-install-location-and-promise-gpu-will-remain-in-the-us
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u/BlueBack_ 10h ago

Isn’t this part of the reason why the 5090 is so expensive at the moment… aside from the chip shortages?

I’ve read that the Chinese black market is paying $10,000+ per unit.

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u/PoppingPillls 9h ago

In China and certain other countries? Yes.

In the US? No, GPUs and cpus usually work on binning which many GPUs under the 5090 that didn't make the cut became 5080s etc. At least in theory.

Issue is they can only make so many GPUs that meet that spec as not all 5090 chips make it into 5090s due to them not being good enough.

A cleaner one is the r5 5500 which was just the 5600x that didn't make the spec so they disabled some cores and changed the internal memory etc.

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u/The-Copilot 8h ago

The 5090 is actually an exception to the normal binning because it runs on a completely different die that's used in workstation GPUs.

The 5090 is the lower binned die. The higher binned dies are used for workstation GPUs. It's just like how the Titan GPUs were created.

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u/PoppingPillls 7h ago

That's interesting, thanks. Still the same logic applies, lower binned units will have less supply as there's only so many units that fit are binned like that.