Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti bought from Amazon had the box contents swapped for bag of suspicious white powder — PC hardware enthusiast bamboozled by Amazon just days after ordering a 5090 with no GPU core, finds salt instead

A PC hardware enthusiast in Taiwan video recorded their Amazon-sourced RTX 5070 Ti unboxing (Mandarin language, no English closed captions). We aren’t sure if the recording was purely made out of caution, made to bolster @8591’s extensive YouTube channel content, or for a bit of both. However, the (un)lucky PC-centric content creator managed to capture the reveal of a bag of salt inside the freshly received package - live on camera. We hear so much about these kinds of Amazon scams (other retailers are available), it is interesting to see one on video.

The Taiwanese TechTuber starts the video in a positive tone. This is despite a recent episode where he bought an Asus ROG Astral LC GeForce RTX 5090 32GB from Amazon Germany, and received a card that was missing the GPU core, among its multitude of faults, just days earlier.

Something was sliding around inside the box…

Back to today’s video, and with the outer Amazon-branded packaging removed, the intrepid enthusiast takes a long, hard look at the Gigabyte Aero GeForce RTX 5070 Ti OC 16G box. This gleaming white packaging looks fine. But before even attempting to cut the seal on this carton, something unusual is noticed. When tilting the box from one angle to another, you can clearly hear something sliding around inside – that isn’t normal…

Next, we see the Gigabyte sleeve slide off, the opening of the inner black cardboard box, and the removal of the top padding sheets of protective packaging. There’s just a lumpen package of powder inside – this is what was sliding around in the space cut out for the graphics card. Further investigation reveals that the powder appears to be common table salt.

This live on-camera discovery might help @8591’s YouTube video grab eyes among the PC community. Nevertheless, he is clearly frustrated with Amazon. According to our machine translation, he rhetorically asks, “Amazon, who did your warehouse contact?” Earlier, we mentioned the TechTuber's recent Amazon Germany package with a missing GPU core, and with this for context, the TechTuber complained, “Graphics cards are so valuable, and you don't even bother to inspect them… Two consecutive failures, two consecutive failures… Should I even return this?”

Taiwan’s RTX 50 prices are surprisingly high

It may be surprising to those living beyond the shores of the silicon island, but PC components and tech gadgets aren’t always the cheapest in Taiwan. As Uniko’s Hardware notes, Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 graphics cards are priced particularly high, relative to some alternative sources abroad. This is why enthusiasts like @8591 sometimes decide to order such components from Amazon’s worldwide network (there is no Amazon Taiwan).

The most popular online stores in Taiwan for PC hardware are places like Shoppee.tw and PCHome24. In Taiwan, the best-priced RTX 5070 Ti models at PCHome24 are TWD$32,990 (USD$1,100). With its relatively low VAT rate of 7% this seems too much. A quick glance over at Amazon.com shows RTX 5070 Ti choices are available from USD$779. Only yesterday, we highlighted that U.S. Best Buy customers could even snag an RTX 5080 OC for USD$999.

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