Wear on mining cards?

[tdmaster]

What is the performance wear of a gpu used for mining? I want to know because once the cryptocurrency craze dies the market is gonna be flooded with cards. So will cards be significantly worse or only slightly? Maybe not at all? I know that used cards for games do not degrade but mining seems like a different story because they are running so hard all day.

 

[4745454b]

It's going to depend on the miner. Some of them jack up the clocks and voltage to get the highest hash rate. Those cards will be toast or nearly dead. Others will tune their cards for mining efficiency. Those cards should still have life in them. The problem is everyone is going to claim their cards are "nearly new" and they only "tested" their card with mining. Figuring out which was used how will be impossible.

The other issue you'll have is cooling life left. Fans don't last forever and if the fan was running super fast for long periods the card itself might be ok but you'll need to buy a dead card from ebay to get the cooler.

 

[tdmaster]

Arent fans replaceable?
https://www.amazon.com/Graphics-Card-Fans/b?ie=UTF8&node=3015421011
And yea i get everything else, i just hope that a new line of cards come out when bitcoin crashes. It will scare miners in the future to horde cards

 

[4745454b]

It's hit or miss how replaceable the fan will be. Some are easier to replace than others. Some of the ones you listed in there were close to $60 because they were a completely new cooler. Obviously thats a bad idea. You might be able to find a new fan, or not.

I doubt new cards is going to flood the market with old cards. The 10 series from Nvidia came out, and people are still buying up the older 9 series cards. Any "modern" AMD card is still hard to find. Some miners are even buying the older 290 and 390s. I wouldn't count on new cards coming out and all of a sudden 970s and 1060s are going to be easy/cheap to find.

 

[tdmaster]

I said i hope a new series comes out at the same time as bitcoin crashing, so the market would be flooded

 

[4745454b]

And I'm saying probably won't happen. You can hope sure, but I really don't see that happening.