[SOLVED] Casual Mining and Degradation?

[Randi Poling]

So my bro in law got me curious about mining. That now has me curious, if I casually mine on it (3060) when not using my computer, how much degradation will I see?

I'm currently running it at a power limit of 70ish percent and the temperature doesn't go above 58c while mining.

Sorry for all the questions, just been a bit out of the loop on this kind of stuff for a while!

 

[Metal Messiah.]

It actually depends on the usage, and obviously if you are NOT going to mine 24/7, then expect the degradation to be much less than actual Mining rigs/cards IMO. But I can't really comment how much of a wear and tear mining is going to cause to any gaming GPU, but you should definitely expect some form of degradation, if the card has also been used outside of gaming.

Are you doing this on a daily basis ? How many hours ?

 

[Phaaze88]

Mining can actually be less punishing on a gpu than actually gaming on it.
The sensible miners are going to undervolt and underclock the gpu core, thus help the gpu use less power and run cooler.


The only problem I've noticed so far is that the memory is overclocked.
The Vram's voltage is fixed from bios. There's no changing that value without hacking the vbios.
Whether the memory is being cooled properly or not, that overclock is going to 'break' at some point, and Vram OC'ing isn't as forgiving as core clock OC'ing.
After a few years(+/-) of running a Vram OC, once you start running into instability, things just go downhill from there, and there's no fixing it - the fixed memory voltage doesn't help things.

 

[Randi Poling]

It actually depends on the usage, and obviously if you are NOT going to mine 24/7, then expect the degradation to be much less than actual Mining rigs/cards IMO. But I can't really comment how much of a wear and tear mining is going to cause to any gaming GPU, but you should definitely expect some form of degradation, if the card has also been used outside of gaming.

Are you doing this on a daily basis ? How many hours ?

I ran it for maybe 3, 4 hours today, I don't think I'd do it on a daily basis, and if I do do it, maybe 5 hours tops if I do decide to do some mining, maybe if I go out for a bit on the weekends or something.

I read online like the guy above me said about lowering the power, which I did, but I didn't slide the clock speed down though, and I kept it below 60C the whole 3/4 hours I ran it today.

 

[Phaaze88]

Power not used making the money is power wasted.
Ethereum and other coins like it are heavy on the Vram. Doing both underclocking and undervolting to the gpu core is to reign in Gpu Boost as much as possible - it can't be disabled.
Since the core isn't really being utilized while mining, letting it boost fully is wasting power. Wasted power = lower profits.