A Word Of Warning On Used GPUs

[Ninjawithagun]

"If the seller owns up to the fact that a given card was used for mining, it’s best to just walk away." You have now convinced those miners selling their cards to lie to potential buyers.

 

[Ninjawithagun]

"The constant high level of power running through the card, coupled with the taxing workload and heat, can damage the onboard circuitry and lead to the card failing far sooner than expected."

That's nonsense. A constant level of power is, if anything, beneficial as it avoids thermal cycling that induces physical stresses on delicate solder joints. And electronics, if properly cooled, can run for many years at full load.

Inadequate cooling could perhaps be a concern on cards used for mining, as could the wear on the fan bearings.

Classic miner propaganda right there

Buying a Used Graphics Card? What to Watch For...............

What to watch out for? Watch out to not buy a card that was used in mining. Ran 24/7, with modded unofficial bios and who knows how else modified.

Not to mention that its the miners who ruined gaming/PC building by driving prices to insane levels, buying GPU that was used to mining is a straight support for miners. They buy gaming GPUs specifically because they know some naive people will buy them any time, they use that as their escape plan if something goes wrong and they want to get their money back.

By buying GPU from a miner you support them and their cancerous behaviour, you become part of the problem.

Common sense really. But, in the end how do you tell that the seller is a miner? You can't other than if they are stupid enough to post that they have several units for sale at once. We, as consumers are absolutely screwed if we want to buy a card right now unless we happen to be one of the very lucky few that grab one still in stock (for about 30 seconds) from online or in store (Best Buy, Microcenter, Fry's, etc.). Ultimately, the only solution is for both AMD and Nvidia to develop two separate lines of cards; one for miners and one for gamers. Neither card will be good at the other function as it would be a hardware level design restriction.

 

[cryoburner]

I think it's a mistake to assume that every miner is a professional who makes the best decisions. Everywhere you look there are people late to the party suddenly interested in mining. This forum is full of them. And yes, half are looking into efficiency and undervolting and profitability and ROI. The other half have completely unrealistic expectations and make poor decisions.

Another thing to consider is college students mining in their dorm rooms, or other cases where utilities are included in the cost of housing. If someone is not directly paying for their electricity, they have little reason to underclock their cards or otherwise care about efficiency.

And it might not even be mining. Cards might be used in Internet gaming cafes for example, where they might see heavy use for many hours each day, or maybe in something like a render farm, where getting the work done fast might be more important than the power use.

I sure hope the video card makers turn this from subjective to definitive. Some sort of hours / history / odometer baked into the silicon. But not just time, also load factor. Some sort of integral or summing calculation. Then reasonable thresholds to deter "heavy" miners vs gamers. It could only help their warranty dept as well as the used card market adding a level of predictability vs uncertainty to their market.

That's something that could be done, and it's a bit surprising that it isn't already. Many monitors, motherboards and other components will track things like power-on hours, power cycles and so on, and hard drives have SMART data with all sorts of detailed information about conditions the drive has experienced. It wouldn't likely be hard to store data about GPU conditions in a tiny bit of non-user-modifiable flash memory, including things like maximum clock rates the card has been subjected to, maximum and average load temperatures, times the card has crashed, and so on.

 

[Ninjawithagun]

Good points cryoburner! Interestingly enough, and sad as well, I know several people that tried to get into bitcoin mining, but found out soon enough that it was a fruitless effort. The substantial level of hardware and amount of calculations (and time) required just to get a tiny fraction of a bit coin is ludicrous. People go into bitcoin mining thinking they are going to make thousands of dollars over night or even just a few months. But alas, it is not true. For example, the Chinese have entire warehouses full of bitcoin mining machines operating 24/7 and still only produce a few bitcoins a month at most. What are people thinking that they could make any kind of profit with just a few consumer level graphics cards?? These idiots, who are also the ones to partially blame for driving up the prices on consumer GPUs are now the same ones dumping them back onto the market because they found out that bitcoin mining was not profitable for them. If you didn't get into bitcoin mining when it first came out, I will tell you now it is a worthless effort doomed to failure unless you are a multi-millionaire already and have the financial means to run warehouses full of bitcoin mining machines.

 

[TJ Hooker]

I think it's a mistake to assume that every miner is a professional who makes the best decisions. Everywhere you look there are people late to the party suddenly interested in mining. This forum is full of them. And yes, half are looking into efficiency and undervolting and profitability and ROI. The other half have completely unrealistic expectations and make poor decisions.

You could say the same thing about cards used for gaming. Plenty of gamers overclocking their cards without a clue what they're doing, running them hard without paying attention to temperature, etc.

Another thing to consider is college students mining in their dorm rooms, or other cases where utilities are included in the cost of housing. If someone is not directly paying for their electricity, they have little reason to underclock their cards or otherwise care about efficiency.

Mining in a small enclosed space like a dorm is a good way to turn your room into a sauna. If I were trying to mine in a dorm, I'd be interested in efficiency just for the sake of trying not to heat my room up too much. Also, you have to deal with the noise, so it's beneficial to aim for efficient operation to minimize fan speed.

 

[TJ Hooker]

@Ninjawithagun no one has been mining bitcoin with GPUs for years...

 

[Ninjawithagun]

@Ninjawithagun no one has been mining bitcoin with GPUs for years...

You are out of touch. You might want to take a look at GPU prices. Bitcoining is the very reason why. Did you actually read the first post??

 

[electro_neanderthal]

@Ninjawithagun no one has been mining bitcoin with GPUs for years...

You are out of touch. You might want to take a look at GPU prices. Bitcoining is the very reason why. Did you actually read the first post??

Actually, miners have been mining other, smaller cryptocurrency and either a) exchanging that for bitcoin via a network, or through trades; or b) holding it and hoping it becomes big in a few years time.

No regular PC is capable of mining bitcoin efficiently anymore, so the other cryptocurrencies is what non-ASIC miners have been going for.

 

[Ninjawithagun]

@Ninjawithagun no one has been mining bitcoin with GPUs for years...

You are out of touch. You might want to take a look at GPU prices. Bitcoining is the very reason why. Did you actually read the first post??

Actually, miners have been mining other, smaller cryptocurrency and either a) exchanging that for bitcoin via a network, or through trades; or b) holding it and hoping it becomes big in a few years time.

No regular PC is capable of mining bitcoin efficiently anymore, so the other cryptocurrencies is what non-ASIC miners have been going for.

Actually, there a great many people still attempting to mine bitcoin with regular desktop GPUs. And when I state "bitcoin", I'm referring to crypto currency in general and not a specific type. ASIC mining is the only way to go unless you want to join a conglomerate of miners. Bottom line, bitcoin mining for the rest of us is a futile effort.

 

[electro_neanderthal]

@Ninjawithagun no one has been mining bitcoin with GPUs for years...

You are out of touch. You might want to take a look at GPU prices. Bitcoining is the very reason why. Did you actually read the first post??

Actually, miners have been mining other, smaller cryptocurrency and either a) exchanging that for bitcoin via a network, or through trades; or b) holding it and hoping it becomes big in a few years time.

No regular PC is capable of mining bitcoin efficiently anymore, so the other cryptocurrencies is what non-ASIC miners have been going for.

Actually, there a great many people still attempting to mine bitcoin with regular desktop GPUs. And when I state "bitcoin", I'm referring to crypto currency in general and not a specific type. ASIC mining is the only way to go unless you want to join a conglomerate of miners. Bottom line, bitcoin mining for the rest of us is a futile effort.

Ah, I see. It looked like you were being specific about bitcoin because the response was to a specific statement about bitcoin. I apologize.

 

[TJ Hooker]

@Ninjawithagun if you're not referring specifically to bitcoin, why say "bitcoin"? Just say crypto(currency), or altcoins. Otherwise no one knows which you're talking about. It's like using "USD" interchangeably with "money", it just makes conversation less clear.

 

[stevejewels]

"The constant high level of power running through the card, coupled with the taxing workload and heat, can damage the onboard circuitry and lead to the card failing far sooner than expected."

That's nonsense. A constant level of power is, if anything, beneficial as it avoids thermal cycling that induces physical stresses on delicate solder joints. And electronics, if properly cooled, can run for many years at full load.

Inadequate cooling could perhaps be a concern on cards used for mining, as could the wear on the fan bearings.

You should probably stick with stuff you know, thermodynamics is not it.

 

[chetmaster12]

While heat can and does degrade the silicon in the GPU core itself, I wouldn't necessarily avoid a card used for mining, since I'd much prefer to buy something that was run at 85% load 24/7 for six months than something that was under a variable load with lots of power cycles (as in a gaming rig or workstation).
Furthermore, I've seen fans die after three months. On the other hand, the fans from my power amp ran 24/7 365 from 1998 to 2015 before the bearings failed, and they weren't expensive fans either. Again, power cycles can have an impact on this, as can orientation and most importantly, quality. And fans are cheap enough that you might as well replace them anyways.

If a card shows signs of instability, or if there is evidence of extreme heat (discoloration or smell), then it's one to avoid.

 

[Ninjawithagun]

It is interesting what people 'prefer' without any real facts, statistics, or study to prove one way or the other. In the end, it's a solid risk to buy a used graphics card, regardless of how it was used in the past and what it will be used for in the future.

 

[Ninjawithagun]

@Ninjawithagun if you're not referring specifically to bitcoin, why say "bitcoin"? Just say crypto(currency), or altcoins. Otherwise no one knows which you're talking about. It's like using "USD" interchangeably with "money", it just makes conversation less clear.

Potato...got it. Sure thing --> crypto currency

But then, you really knew what I meant, so troll along.

 

[zodiacfml]

No. The only way to get a good, used video card is during a crypto currency crash or there is a lot of used cards being sold. Mining cards are fine to buy if the miner/owner was able to underclock them.

Wait for the Nvidia 2000 series, some miners might want the latest cards and dump the used cards.