Hardware engineer and YouTuber Roman 'der8auer' Hartung has exposed another GPU scam — this time a professionally gutted card sold in Germany. A viewer bought a used Palit RTX 5090 via Kleinanzeigen for €1,800 in cash. He met the seller in person, was shown a year-old receipt for two cards, but could not test the card on the spot. It never produced a picture.
On a test bench the card lit up but drew 0 watts at its power connector. When der8auer removed the backplate and cooler, he found a genuine Palit RTX 5090 board — minus its GPU and memory chips. The components had been removed with professional rework equipment: a dual-sided reflow station and real expertise are required. The card's serial number also did not match its box.
Such chips do not end up in the trash. heise online notes that stripped GPUs and VRAM feed bare boards for DIY AI accelerators — a market boosted by export restrictions keeping the fastest US chips out of China, where compute clusters built from gaming GPUs are in demand. Gutted cards have surfaced internationally before; this is reportedly one of the first professionally stripped cases in Germany.
New RTX 5090s now cost close to €5,000, so the €1,800 asking price was itself a red flag. der8auer hopes the manufacturer can trace the card through its serial numbers; the buyer has filed a police report. The advice for buyers of used high-end GPUs: test before you pay — even when the deal feels local and personal.
