A Chinese seller has started offering a heavily modified version of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 on Alibaba, which not only doubles the factory memory but triples it to reach an impressive 96 GB of GDDR7 VRAM. The price? Nothing less than almost $4,000.
The standard RTX 5090 comes with 32 GB of VRAM through a 512-bit bus. However, for AI workloads, such as training and running large language models (LLMs) locally, the amount of available memory is the real bottleneck. To achieve this huge increase, the modders replaced the original GDDR7 chips with higher-capacity modules and reconfigured the PCB using advanced BGA soldering techniques.
Modified Nvidia RTX 5090 With 96 GB VRAM
This type of modification is not official and is not supported by Nvidia, but it meets the current needs of the professional GPU market, which needs computing power for its large data centers. By turning a consumer graphics card into a 96 GB beast, independent labs and developers get a powerful alternative for running large models without paying the tens of thousands of dollars that an enterprise accelerator costs.
However, buying hardware like this comes with risks. In addition to completely voiding the warranty, the thermal management and power consumption of these custom units are very delicate.
Even so, their appearance on platforms such as Alibaba shows that the demand for video memory continues to grow and that the community is willing to push hardware to its limits to support the AI boom, which requires huge amounts of memory.
