A hardware enthusiast named Kate successfully used voltage glitching to transform a $2,500 Nvidia CMP-170HX mining card into a high-performance 80GB VRAM GPU. By exploiting the onboard eFuse controller, she unlocked factory-disabled HBM2e memory modules.
The hack utilizes an $8 STM32G4 microcontroller to intercept PWMVID signals, allowing write access to security bit flags. This hardware mod enables PCIe 4.0 speeds, ECC, and NVLink, surpassing the limits of previous soft-mods that capped VRAM at 64GB.
This discovery allows a $2,500 card to rival a $20,000 Nvidia A100, delivering 20% higher FP16 performance. Kate reported the vulnerability to Nvidia before publishing her research, which highlights significant security flaws in GA100 silicon fuse arrays.