Well, that escalated quickly.

In Part 1 of this investigation, I went down a rabbit hole after reading about some absolutely fascinating work being done to unlock NVIDIA GPUs through voltage fault injection, eFuse manipulation, and early-boot firmware modifications.

To reiterate the question I'm broadening the existing research to:

Can we identify and potentially recover disabled hardware on an older NVIDIA GPUs, purely to increase consumer performance? Specifically my disposable PNY GTX 1650?

I spent some time building a dedicated Arch Linux research environment, reading hardware registers, poking around Nouveau's driver initialization process, and generally bullying a depressed graphics card.

And guess what?