Techie uses voltage glitching hack to turn $2,500 Nvidia 8GB cryptomining GPU into a full-fat $20,000 A100 with 80GB of VRAM
A techie turned a $2,500 CMP-170HX 8GB mining card into a full-fat $20,000 A100 80GB by carefully blowing onboard fuses to unlock entire VRAM and shader modules.
A tech enthusiast has developed a method to transform an 8GB Nvidia CMP-170HX mining GPU, purchased for $2,500, into a high-performance 80GB A100 GPU. The hack, called CMPunlocker, involves exploiting the microcode of GA100 cards and disabling protective fuses, allowing access to additional VRAM and performance features. The process requires a custom circuit board with an STM32G4 microcontroller to manipulate voltage signals, effectively bypassing the card's security measures.
While the mod does not enable all the features of a full A100 GPU, such as ECC, NVLink, or multi-instance GPU support, it unlocks the card's full potential, providing PCIe 4.0 speed with the complete set of features. The cost of a CMP-170HX 8GB GPU is around $3,000, while the 10GB variant is $2,500. In contrast, a full-fat A100 80GB GPU can cost $20,000 or more.
The tech community is abuzz with the discovery, as another person independently found the same issue and Kate has informed Nvidia about the vulnerability.
Written by urgent.news from Tom's Hardware's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
