The world's grainiest footage purports to show an RTX 5090 being tested in a factory designed to bypass export restrictions to China. But I have my doubts

While the RTX 5090's alleged specs have caused much internet discussion in recent months, we have yet to see any images or footage of the card being used. A video on Bilibili purports to show two of the new GPUs mounted on a rack.

The video was reportedly taken at a factory in Batam (Indonesia) that makes Zotac graphics card. The facility was built to maintain supply lines with China outside of US export regulations. Two plus-sized graphics cards are seen on test benches, in front of a small group of employees who cheer and clap when the system boots up (via Tom's Hardware).

Zotac, a brand owned and operated by PC Partner (formerly based in Hong Kong), has recently relocated its headquarters from Hong Kong to Singapore as part an expansion into Southeast Asia. This factory is the new Batam manufacturing plant announced earlier this year.

What are we to make of this? The cards are large, and the accompanying voiceover reportedly states that the cooler is slightly larger than the RTX 4090. However, it's not by a great deal.

It's not surprising that the RTX 5090 will need a lot of cooling. However, it is difficult to imagine how it could grow much larger than the current RTX 4090 without severely limiting its installation options.

I think that's a pretty standard design with three fans. The PC Gamer Hardware team did a search for something similar and found the Zotac RTX4070 Ti Super Solid OC.

This is an interesting graphics card, as it is based on a reduced AD102 GPU. The RTX 4090D was built to circumvent US government export restrictions on high performance hardware to China. This factory is said by some to be doing the same thing. It's possible that the RTX 4090D we see here was assembled and tested on hardware from this facility for the first.

It's also worth noting that the power connector appears to be a 16-pin connection. Rumours suggest that the RTX 5090 may use two connectors to meet its 600 W peak power requirement. One 16-pin 12VHPWR can deliver up to 600 W. It would make sense for a card that could reach that limit to split its power over two connectors.

It's possible that we will see the RTX-5090 in a graphics cards factory in Indonesia. A glimpse of a cooling system doesn't tell us much. It does show that the card is similar in size to an RTX4090, that it appears to use a single power connector, and that in this case, three fans are used.

The crowd reaction tells a lot. A few employees may be celebrating the first boot up of an RTX 5090 in their test rig, or perhaps just the first boot for the test rigs as a whole. What we may be seeing is the first fruits of an rushed facility that is taking its first steps into GPU production, despite the voiceover.

Ifs, buts, maybes. As current rumours suggest Nvidia is aiming for a simultaneous RTX launch of RTX5090, RTX5080 and RTX5070 at CES in 2025, there's a good chance that someone will spill the beans before then. However, this grainy video has some heavy question marks hovering over it for now.