A technology enthusiast has managed to do the impossible, by merely manipulating the voltage of a graphics card, she managed to create a card faster than Nvidia’s own $20,000 A100 GPU with 80 GB of VRAM… but starting from an 8 GB CMP-170HX mining card that costs $2,500.
The voltage modification was carried out by Kate (link to GitHub), who started from an article that described how the microcode of GA100 cards could be exploited.
She focused on the integrated fuse controller, which is normally protected. Although it’s rarely talked about, a fuse box has long been an integral component in almost every CPU and GPU, although it’s normally used only once at the factory to break the chips’ physical connections to the parts that performed poorly in testing, thus disabling them so they can be sold as lower-end models.
Techie uses voltage glitching hack to turn $2,500 Nvidia 8GB cryptomining GPU into a full-fat $20,000 A100 with 80GB of VRAM — hack carefully blows onboard fuses to unlock entire VRAM and shader modules https://t.co/wVZQHytdyj
— Tom’s Hardware (@tomshardware) November 12, 2026
If you’re wondering how you get 80 and 40 GB of VRAM out of 8-10 GB, the explanation is simple: the GA100 chip actually includes all the corresponding HBM2e VRAM chips inside it; but these are disabled at the factory, just like the shader modules.
The smaller version is more desirable, since it is based on the GA100 variant with 80 GB of HBM2e inside it, whereas the 10 GB cards derive from the 40 GB GA100. The rest is history, but fair warning, she asked GPT-6 Astra for help designing a simple circuit board based on an $8 STM32G4 microcontroller that would let her access the power signals on the card’s printed circuit board.
Author: Chema Carvajal Sarabia
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