Linus Tech Tips: Free RAM, not a SCAM

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Five years ago we looked at the CMP 170HX, a seemingly useless card as it was strictly made for mining crypto currency. But in the big 2026, this card is no longer its once useless self. The CMP 170HX can now be modded to unlock up to 80GB of memory, and if you can do some tiny soldering work, unlock it's full PCIe Gen 1 x16 bandwidth.

LTT Labs Article: https://www.lttlabs.com/articles/2026/09/12/cmp-170hx-cmpunlocker

Fan Duct model: https://www.printables.com/model/1824287-nvidia-a100-cmp-170hx-120mm-fan-duct

Discuss on the forum: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1642678-free-ram-not-a-scam/

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CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
2:00 Tall Linus and baseline benchmarks
4:48 Unlocking the CMP 170HX
7:47 Benchmarking after unlocking
10:58 Running Qwen on 3090 Tis
12:35 What about TWO CMP 170HX's
13:15 Oh no we have a bad card
13:38 Why would a card be demoted?
14:33 We found a bad one
15:16 Capacitor Mod
16:22 Running Qwen on TWO modded CMP 170HX's
18:43 Outro