@sofia@chaos.social Ah, that was a *different* batch of GPUs than the one I was thinking of. The one I was thinking of was when Bitcoin started being ASIC-mined and everyone was trying to get rid of their cards, it was all regular cards back then.

The second batch (when other cryptocurrencies started tanking) were indeed different, though they weren't exactly locked down, rather they didn't have display outputs and not all of them could be rerouted through another port in the system. Could still be used for general-purpose OpenCL compute though, not just cryptocurrency, just not for games.

I do know that even of these, a fair subset could be rerouted so that eg. the display ports of the on-board GPU on the mobo could be used with the silicon in the no-display-output cards, but this depended on both the card and the motherboard IIRC.

The others probably ended up getting reused for LLM stuff...