She applied the mod to her cards and, after testing with multiple workloads, found that nine had the full 80 GB of VRAM working, and one card "only" had 64 GB usable. Most interestingly, unlocking all the shader modules (SM) nets her FP16 FMA performance 20% beyond a regular A100 card. She thinks this is due to the chips often having 120 or more usable SMs — over the 108 on the spec sheet. The GA100 die starts with 128 SMs to account for defects, which is normal in chip manufacturing.
The CMPUnlocker soft mod is required for enabling the "new" features on the drivers , but it doesn't unlock the card's full potential: the VRAM upper limit is 40-64GB (depending on the variant), many shader modules remain locked, and PCIe bandwidth only goes to 2.0. Additionally, there's no ECC, NVLink, or multi-instance GPU support, all of which are critical in a server setup and are also used for product segmentation.
Kate's volt-mod does away with all of these limits, and her best test card is happily working at PCIe 4.0 speed with the full feature set. She didn't test the video encoder bits, but it's unlikely anybody using these cards cares much for that.
As for the cost, a CMP-170HX 8GB is currently hovering around $3,000, and the 10GB variant costs around $2,500. A full-fat Nvidia A100 80GB in a PCIe configuration can reach $20,000 or more. The SXM server-module versions are cheaper, but they require infrastructure around them. Note that these prices will likely vary significantly, especially as people become increasingly aware of the mods.
Kate says she's publishing her research now because another person independently found the same issue. She has informed Nvidia of the vulnerability, though there's not much the company can do for existing cards already on the market.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News , or add us as a preferred source , to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.
Bruno Ferreira Social Links Navigation Contributor Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/techie-turns-usd2-500-cmp-170hx-8gb-mining-card-into-a-full-fat-a100-80gb-with-voltage-glitching-carefully-blowing-onboard-fuses-to-unlock-entire-vram-and-shader-modules#main
- https://futureplc.com/privacy-policy/
- AMD's fastest gaming CPU and the Radeon RX 9070 just hit a massive $550 discount
- AMD’s Venice-X maxes out family at 5.3 GHz, returning 3D V-Cache to data center after four years
- Struggling marijuana farms pivot to becoming AI data center sites to escape falling weed revenue
- 1994 Jeep Cherokee owner hacks 32-year-old car with Claude AI to pass California smog tests
- Save $300 on this 1440p gaming PC with a 9800X3D and RTX 5070 right now
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.