Voltage Glitching Converts Nvidia CMP-170HX Mining GPU into 80GB A100-Class Card

A tech enthusiast has used voltage glitching to modify an $2,500 Nvidia CMP-170HX cryptomining GPU, which was originally limited to 8GB of VRAM, unlocking additional VRAM and shader modules to create a card reported to perform faster than a $20,000 Nvidia A100 equipped with 80GB of VRAM. The procedure carefully blew onboard fuses to reveal the card’s full silicon potential, building on earlier community modifications such as CMPunlocker, a software method that expanded the CMP-170HX’s capabilities beyond its factory settings. The hack highlights growing interest in repurposing low-cost data-center and mining hardware for local AI builds, while also showing the risks and uncertainty involved in bypassing Nvidia’s product segmentation through destructive hardware-level tricks.