Good idea or bad idea?
This guy says it's a bad idea to buy GPUs that were used for mining, because the stress on the cards may have degraded the silicon, and the cards might fail after not very long. Some people have argued against him, perhaps because they want to buy a cheap second-hand GPU and believe it will be fine, or because they're trying to flog a mining GPU themselves:
>https://www.techradar.com/news/did-i-make-it-harder-to-sell-your-crappy-used-crypto-mining-graphics-card-good
What do you think? Would you buy a GPU that has been used for mining?
cryptos BTFO
The free market system leads to the most optimal distribution of resources.
GPUs are currently sold by official distributors at a sub-optimal price, due to abnormal market forces due to a number of extraordinary externalities relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Scalpers provide a valuable service to consumers by selling goods at equilibrium price, enabling those with the greatest interest to obtain goods when at a time when they would otherwise be unavailable due to demand exceeding supply.
Those with the greatest interest and means are more likely than others to use their GPUs for productive enterprise, and scalpers provide them a means to obtain GPUs at equilibrium price.
Crypto miners provide a valuable service for dark money around the globe to profit from activities which are banned by overbearing central governments (a regrettable distortion of fundamental market forces leading to non-Pareto efficient distributions). By enabling money laundering and the trade of illegal good such as drugs, weapons, illicit pornography, sex slaves etc. crypto miners provide a valuable service by freeing market forces from parasitic statist institutions.
Remember, complaining about these prices is communism and will not be tolerated.
You have been warned.
Do you think cards used for mining are worth buying? Or do you reckon they'll fail within a short period of time?
nice try, israelite
>Scalpers provide a valuable service
Nice try, rabbi.
a lot of the miners are 3rd world government shills using printed money to mass purchase cards at the factory. It's not the free market at all
nice pasta brodie
Holy shit this pasta is almost a year old...
zased free market literalist
>ever buying used hardware
>ever trusting anyone involved in cryptoscams
It's like you want to get scammed.
>Yes, goy. Always buy new, fill my pockets. You wouldn't want parts that fail, would you?
>Don't you hate your fellow man who seeks to preserve the value of his money? He took the latest graphics cards from you!
>Cards degrade when cycling power, not when under constant power
>Crypto cards are undervolted and kept cool in large facilities
They are fine to buy. It's fascinating how people have such seething hatred for crypto that they encourage people not to buy used cards just to frick over miners.
>you deserve to get my used up seconds that i ripped from stores so i could mine my scamcoins and also drove up prices making pc gaming a niche instead of available to normal people
keep it, i hope you go bankrupt.
>Crypto cards are undervolted and kept cool in large facilities
moron
maybe they undervolted the core to save power for extra profits
but they also overclocked the memory for same reason
it's the thermal cycling that kills the card, bga contacts crack. average IQfy anon card is much more likely to fail than miners card.
Yeah I'm sure the people exploiting a commodity with dubious long-term returns have been running them for longevity instead of immediate value
still not buying your used garbage, sanjeet
>Crypto cards are undervolted and kept cool in large facilities
How do you know that though. Not every miner is going to take the same care of their hardware
this is true if the miner using them was smart, if he is moronic then they may be fricked, basically it's a case to case basis, just go with your gut feeling, and you'll be fine, i think
Most mining GPUs where undercooked and undervolted so they should be in better condition than used gaming GPUs.
you can smell the climate change bitterness in his post
hes also incorrect the second best time is not now. this is not the first time ETH has crashed
people keep repeating this but forget to mention the memory has been cooked.
Watching journos seethe is fun. There's not enough lampposts.
lmao, he did learnt to code
>shell scripts
>coding
lol
lmao, even
>undervolted
>properly cooled
silicon aging occurs regardless, which is why voltage guardbands exists. the issue with mining gpus is not that they're not adequately cooled (though higher temps or vdd would worsen aging), but that they're operating 24/7. i would not take my chances with one of these
some references:
- "VARIUS: A Model of Process Variation and Resulting Timing Errors for Microarchitects". IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING, VOL. 21, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2008
- "Run-time technique for simultaneous aging and power optimization in GPGPUs". 2014 51st ACM/EDAC/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)
- "ExtraTime: Modeling and analysis of wearout due to transistor aging at microarchitecture-level". IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2012)
- "Facelift: Hiding and slowing down aging in multicores". 41st IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture.
High-quality post
Well it depends on the price. If it's much, much cheaper than buying new you can risk it.
You're forgetting the actual killer of GPUs
Thermal cycling
Maybe some miners were smart and undervolted their cards while running them in air conditioned rooms.
I would bet however that most of them are absolute morons that only wanted their own money printing machine and are more likely than average to also be scumbags that WILL try to scam you.
If you have a card and want to take a fully informed purchase decision Just Wait™ until August/September for RTX 4000 release; if you don't have a card and need one right now just buy new, they're already at or slightly under MSRP.
>buy used gpu
>receive brick with printed pic of gpu
>no refunds
The cards themselves will be fine, probably better than buying cards used for gaming since they'll have been underclocked and constantly running.
Only component I'd worry about is VRAM as it's commonly overclocked for eth mining. 3080/90s are pretty hit or miss for cooling VRAM chips and some AIBs like Gigabyte ship tons of cards with wrongly sized thermal pads.
If you pick a card with good cooling you just have to look out for failing fans, old thermal paste or dirty heatsinks, but these are easily fixed.
I think with some precautions its safe to buy used gpus
#1 check tamper proof screw sticker is undamaged
#2 check seller history, avoid sellers that have offloaded multiple gpus
#3 avoid cards with gddr6x - runs hot under normal circumstances
There are two forces at play that kill silicon; and that's thermal expansion stress and electron migration or something. Either way; they do degrade over time at high temps and also from the thermal expansion and shrinking process of being turned on and off.
Mining cards don't get the thermal expansion so they are likely to be fine.
i mean, miners expected to keep going indefinitely so they probably preserved their cards properly
I'm not rewarding the pieces of shit who scammed their way for supply.
Let them hold their bags
Everyone here is 12 or something, buying their first GPU? Mining GPUs are just fine. I've been there for every single pump-and-dump cycle of crypto. I've scored multiple miner RX480s, then 580s, then a few 980ti's, then few 1070 non-Ti's few years back after another dip. Bunch more Pascals. I generally buy them in 2s or 3s (for Xfire and SLI purposes, while that was a thing).
Literally never had a failed mining GPU. I've pushed them hard, all of them, with Hwbot records to show. Not just game and idle, I mean hard volt mods, heavy duty OCing, again for Hwbot gold purposes. No issues.
Not sure what kind of abuse they went at the hands of miners, but it was nothing compared to what I did to them, again not a single one failed. I mean, lesson here is dont buy from ME after I'm done torturing them.
Last dead GPU? Apollo 6800 vanilla... about 15 years ago? Yeah, ama boomer.
The crypto scammers want one last scam to go out on and that's selling off their hardware for as much as possible and that involves lying about how good the condition is. They have really kicked it into over drive now, but they've been trying to grease the resale value for a while now. The only thing anyone involved with crypto knows is scamming people and those are the last types you should ever do business with. I would not touch a used gpu with a ten foot pole and I advise everyone else to do the same.
Considering the shortages of components, China-vs-West animosities, and well known corner cutting in an industry known for corner cutting when times/sales are doing fyne, you are probably going to have same chance of gettting DOA GPU new-vs-miner/used at this point anyway.
Days of when you could point at brand A vs B or C and say that brand has better/worse DOA/fail rate than others, are loooonggg gone. Its all shit now. All of it.
The only problem is the degraded VRM.
Those gaming cards weren't designed for 24/7 usage in mind.
Good idea or bad idea?
long paragraph explaining why my idea is good and yours is crap.
>here's a link to invalidate your point.
What do you think guyz? Am i kawaii UwU
Discrete GPUs are engineered to fail due to BGA losing contact between the die and substrate after some heat cycles. Soldering is also dogshit nowadays, I've seen a lot of modern PCB components literally start to desolder themselves (moving) after prolonged repeated heat cycling. Modern GPUs are far likely to fail due to losing contact long before chip degradation kicks in. The ~~*journalist*~~ speaks out of their ass. The only winning move is to not support the dGPU israelite.
iGPU gang ftw.
>iGPU
Laptop CPUs with iGPU are still BGA. You need to clarify that you refer to desktop PCs or old laptops. Like that: PGA|LGA/iGPU gang
i hope crybto gets a 4th bull cycle for the salt alone
From what I've heard cards used for mining tend to fail due to memory fault. Memory is being using extensively when calculating hashes when mining.
I can afford a new card so I wouldn't bother with whatever risk there may be. It's your money though so why would you give a frick about my opinion. Do what you want you corndog.