Techie uses voltage glitching hack to turn $2,500 Nvidia 8GB cryptomining GPU into a full-fat $20,000 A100 with 80GB

“The volt-mod was done by Kate (GitHub link here), who got her starting point from a paper that described how one could exploit GA100 cards' microcode. She turned her attention to the normally protected onboard fuse controller. Although it's rarely discussed, a "fuse box" has been integral in most any CPU and GPU for a while — though it's normally used once at the factory to break physical connections in chips to parts that have tested poorly, thus disabling them so they can be sold as a lower-end model.


If you're wondering how people are getting 80-40GB of VRAM out of 8-10GB, the explanation is simple: the GA100 silicon actually includes all the corresponding HBM2e VRAM dies within; but they get disabled at the factory like the shader modules. The smaller version is more desirable, as it's based on the variant of GA100 with 80GB of HBM2e within, while the 10GB cards spawn from the 40GB GA100.“

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-com...uses-to-unlock-entire-vram-and-shader-modules

Well, they likely ain't $2,500 no more.

and finally we have an explanation why these are no longer available. the voltage glitching attack allows overwriting the device ID so in the future 170HX will be indistinguishable from a retail A100