Nvidia Optimus tech hack gets retired mining GPUs gaming through Intel CPUs

In today’s episode of ‘Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should’ we have a graphics card from Nvidia and a CPU and motherboard combo from Intel, all doing things they really shouldn’t. Both from a compatibility angle and from 'holy hell, that's a logistical nightmare' point of view. First off we have news from the East, where some enterprising folk have found something to do with those old crypto GPUs that were never meant to exist outside of the mine. At the height of the mining boom Nvidia created non-gaming, mining-specific SKUs of its cards. They were a little cheaper than traditional versions, had warranties measured in days, and no video outputs. The Nvidia P106 is such a card, using the same GPU as the GTX 1060, and came paired with the same level of GDDR5 video memory too. It was effectively a gaming card that just couldn't output to a display. There have previously been reports of people soldering HDMI connections onto these cards in order to game on them, but this latest hack requires no solder, just an updated driver that fools your desktop PC into thinking its a laptop.