Double The VRAM Of An RTX 3070

June 14, 2026 by Fenix Guthrie 13 Comments

Modern games are quite often limited by the amount of volatile memory available to the GPU. Games can require many gigabytes of data during the rasterization process. So the obvious solution for better performance would be to buy a faster GPU, right? Well, not for [AssassinWarlord], who decided to find just what happens when you double the VRAM on an RTX 3070. The forum post is in German, but a translator gets the job done rather nicely.

For those of you following along at home, you will need a set of eight Samsung K4ZAF325BM-HC16 GDDR6 memory modules. In this case, the memory modules were salvaged from an AMD RX6900XT with a defective core. Naturally, you will need to re-ball the chips. To help the process, [AssassinWarlord] bought a stencil from AliExpress, with a 3D-printed holder for the memory modules.

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Re-Enable All Compute Units On The PS5-like BC-250 Cryptomining Card

June 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

The custom APU at the core of Sony’s PlayStation 5 hasn’t just been quietly powering these game consoles, but also made their way onto cryptomining cards around 2023 which are called the BC-250. The APUs on these boards differ from the one found in the PS5 most notably by having two out of eight CPU cores disabled, along with many compute units (CUs) of the iGPU. Now apparently it seems that you can re-enable these CUs per instructions by [duggasco] if you’re feeling adventurous.

The BC-250's AMD APU in all its glory. (Credit: Lowest Logan, YouTube) — The BC-250’s AMD APU in all its glory. (Credit: Lowest Logan, YouTube)

As stated in the project’s README, BC-250 boards come with only 24 out of 40 CUs enabled, but this is not a permanent (e-fuse) thing. Instead you can write to two hardware registers during the GPU driver initialization, something which can be added to for example the Linux kernel module parameters.

Since many of these APUs likely had cores and CUs disabled due to them failing QA during PS5 APU manufacturing, there’s a good chance that some of the CUs truly are bad. Yet as we saw with the AMD Phenom II X3 with a supposedly bad fourth core back in the day, sometimes demand for the ‘defective’ part is high enough that good parts get mixed in as well.

Thus people like [Lowest Logan] decided to give it a shot, demonstrating the use of the patch with Bazzite Linux on a BC-250 system. After a reboot the system does indeed list 40 CUs as being enabled, and running Furmark shows a big boost in performance without any glitches or fire. There is of course thermal throttling, but that is due to the default cooling solution not being designed for running it at full blast.

Incidentally the real PS5 has only 36 active CUs, so this technically makes these unlocked APUs more powerful. With the water cooling solution demonstrated by [Lowest Logan] the thermal throttling is also resolved, showing that you can get a pretty nice gaming system out of these old cryptomining boards if you happen to win the silicon lottery.

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Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Microsoft Windows 11

June 2, 2026 by Jenny List 70 Comments

In our search for the unusual or interesting among the world of operating systems, it might seem unexpected that today’s choice for a Daily Driver is the latest version of Microsoft Windows. Aside from Hackaday perhaps having a larger than average percentage of viewers using Linux based operating systems and generally catering to open source enthusiasts, there’s hardly anything special about Windows, is there?

Oddly for me there is — because while it’s a common enough OS for the masses, the last time I had a Windows computer it ran XP. That venerable OS is a world away from today’s Windows 11, and thus as someone who’s exclusively sat in front of a GNOME desktop for much of the last two decades, it’s an entirely new operating system.

There’s no doubt that it will make a Daily Driver, because of course I’ll be able to do my work on it. Where the interest lies is in seeing what Windows has become. Is it still a useful general purpose operating system, or has it become the locked-down walled garden of crapware that its detractors warn you about? Time to dive in.

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21st Century Punch Cards Are 3D Printed And Read By OpenCV

May 16, 2026 by Tyler August 14 Comments

While a punch card is perhaps the lowest-density storage medium available, it has some distinct advantages. As [Bitroller] points out in the write-up of his punch card project, if he was using stainless steel instead of PLA his 3D printed punch cards would likely outlast everything he owns, and survive a five-alarm fire to boot. If you have 16 bytes you really, really don’t want to forget — or are willing to store your private key in a shoe box — this project might be of interest.

The nice part is that he’s built a handy Python script to generate printable files for the punch cards, which encode 16 bytes of information and 4 bytes of error correction using the Reed-Solomon algorithm. That’s just enough for a password and the error correction means up to two bytes can be recovered in the case of read failure.

The reading is where this gets interesting — again, [Bitroller] provides a handy script, but this one uses OpenCV to read the entire punch card at once from a webcam image, using the contrast between a black table and the light-colored PLA cards. It’s massively overkill and would have needed a supercomputer in the days when punch cards were common I/O, but that’s what makes this a great hack.

We only have one quibble: if you use additive manufacturing, can you still call it a punch card? Nothing was punched out, after all.

If you think punch cards are totally irrelevant in the modern day, well, you might be right– but that doesn’t stop us from playing with them. If punch cards make you think of Big Iron in the early days of computing, maybe think further back– they were used for everything from Jacquard looms to the original MIDI.

Build The CPU, Then Build The Calculator

May 13, 2026 by Jenny List 21 Comments

It’s possible that among Hackaday readers are the largest community of people who have designed their own CPU in the world. We have featured many here, but it’s possible that not so many of them have gone on to power an everyday project. Step forward [Baltazar Studios] then, with a scientific calculator sporting a self-designed CPU on an FPGA.

The calculator itself is nice enough, with a smart 3D printed case, an OLED display which almost evokes a VFD, and very well made buttons. But it’s the CPU which is of most interest, because while it follows a conventional Harvard architecture with a 12-bit instruction set, it works with 4-bit nibbles. This choice follows one used by HP in their calculator designs, seemingly because it can be optimised for the binary coded decimal which the calculator uses.

With calculators being yet another app on our spartphones or comnputers, there seems to be less use of calculators outside of education in 2026. But if you are a calculator user there’s nothing like a calculator you made yourself, and with a CPU of your own design it has few equals. We like this project almost as much as we like the Flapulator!

This Credit Card Computer Follows All Dimensions

May 11, 2026 by Jenny List 8 Comments

A computer the size of a credit card is nothing new. There have been many single-board computers following the familiar dimensions. [Krauseler]’s credit card computer is different, though. It packs an ESP32-C3, e-paper display, NFC reader, and, incredibly, a Li-Po battery into a credit card form factor in three dimensions rather than two. That’s right, this computer is only 1mm thick.

To ensure perfect compliance with the form factor, the enclosure, if that’s what it can be called, is a real NFC card with the middle cut out to take the electronics. The PCB is flexible, and the battery is the thinnest available. The e-paper display is an ultra-thin, flexible variant. A display connector would have been too thick, so a very fine wire-and-solder job was required.

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Why Using Cardboard For A PC Case Is A Chore

May 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 27 Comments

The idea of using cardboard for a sloppy PC case isn’t new; it’s a time-honored tradition dating back to at least the 1990s. That said, with today’s CNC cutters and other advanced tooling available to hobbyists, you might be curious to see how far you can push the concept. As demonstrated in a recent video by [mryeester], the answer appears to be that good planning and a solid understanding of cardboard’s limitations are as essential as ever.

After having the PC case drawn up in CAD and cut on a professional CNC cutter by a buddy who makes commercial cardboard displays, the installation procedure for the PC components showed where a bit of foresight could have saved a lot of time and effort.

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