March 31, 2025 This retail listing has now been taken down, and according to a report on Computerbase.de, retailer Alternate has stated that it does not sell graphics cards with missing ROPs as B-stock, and that this listing was a mistake.
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 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 itted 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 how to install a GPU if you've never done it before.
You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. We also have a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with of the team and fellow readers.