Within the last few days researchers in the US have discovered that 170HX cards (being full A100 cores but locked with falcon chip firmware and pcb design to be run at slower speeds with less memory for the mining boom in 2020) are able to be unlocked to get over 50% functionality of an equivalent A100 data center GPU.
Current 170HX models are 8gb which can unlock upto 64GB of VRAM, and 10gb which theoretically can get upto 80GB but have been somewhat unstable in our testing so far.
Its reported the 170HX cores (GA100-105F) are poorly binned A100 cores that did not pass full HBM validation. and hence are sort of "rejects" - though how many were actually produced by the internet-pictures of miners with hundreds and thousands of them, i question if nvidia really over produced or they just had really bad yields. Thats besides the point.
Right now we were able to follow the procedures to modify these in software to unlock upto 64gb of HBM on the 8gb 170HX cards. Further waiting for components from china to enable the PCIE to gen 2 x16, they come as gen 1 x4 by default for their mining configuration.
Current challenges: no ECC on the HBM, and it looks like the best theoretical pcie gen is 3.0 at x16 but the most we have right now is pcie 2.0 x16
CAUTION: Do not run these GPU's with drivers later than 610.xx - nvidia is currently working to perma-lock these cards so the mod isnt possible with our techniques.
More news (updates to this post) to follow, aswell as a video within a month or so.
Current 170HX models are 8gb which can unlock upto 64GB of VRAM, and 10gb which theoretically can get upto 80GB but have been somewhat unstable in our testing so far.
Its reported the 170HX cores (GA100-105F) are poorly binned A100 cores that did not pass full HBM validation. and hence are sort of "rejects" - though how many were actually produced by the internet-pictures of miners with hundreds and thousands of them, i question if nvidia really over produced or they just had really bad yields. Thats besides the point.
Right now we were able to follow the procedures to modify these in software to unlock upto 64gb of HBM on the 8gb 170HX cards. Further waiting for components from china to enable the PCIE to gen 2 x16, they come as gen 1 x4 by default for their mining configuration.
Current challenges: no ECC on the HBM, and it looks like the best theoretical pcie gen is 3.0 at x16 but the most we have right now is pcie 2.0 x16
CAUTION: Do not run these GPU's with drivers later than 610.xx - nvidia is currently working to perma-lock these cards so the mod isnt possible with our techniques.
More news (updates to this post) to follow, aswell as a video within a month or so.
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