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I'm not an expert but I wouldn't want to buy a second-hand GPU that was stressed by crypto mining.
by baal80spam 4y ago
I'm not an expert but I wouldn't want to buy a second-hand GPU that was stressed by crypto mining.
- jayd16 4y agoI mean, if the price it right, why not? I wouldn't want to pay anywhere near full price, though.
- pojzon 4y agoIf the price is like 20% of retail - why not. If higher or close to retail - why buy used gpu ? Let miners literally drawn in debt.
- moffkalast 4y agoThe damage is actually comparable or lower than normal usage, since they run at a constant temp which is less stressful and tend to be undervolted to get a better hashrate/dollar so the lines shouldn't be eroded much. At least according to that one LinusTechTips test.
- more_corn 4y agoBut they’re put together by amateurs, in non-static safe environments, operated with questionable cooling…
- moffkalast 4y agoSounds like exactly how gamers use them too.
- KennyBlanken 4y agoThere are different problems. Thermal cycling common to gaming uses causes mechanical failures in chips, between chips and the board, and the board - but electrolytic capacitor lifetime drops dramatically as temperature goes up. Not much thermal cycling in desktop systems seeing mostly "productivity" use that have proper ventilation.
- zaptrem 4y agoCapacitors have been massively over-specced for PCs for over a decade now. This was only a potential problem ~<2010 for components like GPUs. Maybe still a problem with really cheap power supplies today, but that's not what we're talking about.
- bsamuels 4y agooptimal running temperatures for gpus during mining is way lower than what most games will pull. memory has to stay as cool as possible or else the overclock will be unstable.
- KennyBlanken 4y agoIt's still 24x7 operation vs a few hours here and there. Even a pretty hardcore daily gamer probably only clocks half a dozen hours a day if they're working a day job.
- fsckboy 4y agobut it's the turning on and off or heating cooling under changing loads that causes the stress, not the constant running
- xxs 4y agoThe GPU core doesn't get stressed much, of course. Memory, however, is another issue - rtx3090 being an absolute disaster (effectively cooling on half of the memory). HBM cards are likely in a similar boat. The (large) GPU mining operations run at rather high ambient.
- diamondlovesyou 4y agoHBM GPUs are better off because the memory cores are in the same package as the compute cores. So they get the same amount of cooling love as the compute cores enjoy. At least in theory.
- timpattinson 4y agoAMD HBM GPUs, the only ones that a PC gamer would buy, are known to suffer from issues with the HBM due to thermal cycling issues
- Dylan16807 4y agoA mining GPU will not experience thermal cycling.
- simonebrunozzi 4y agoExactly. Memory would be the main issue.
- ineedasername 4y agoI don't know anything about component wear patterns, so a question: would a peak constant temp cause less wear than moderate fluctuations? (And is it fast heating/cooling cycles that cause physical stress or is it some other mechanism of action that causes the wear?)
- thepasswordis 4y agoPhysical stress of constantly expanding and contracting.
- MonkeyClub 4y agoHaven't been an EE for a couple of lifetimes now, but iirc yes - best to constantly run (within normal operating limits), rather than run and stop and restart. That holds (? used to hold?) true from anything to GPUs to individual capacitors, the repetition of the heat cool cycles is the primary cause of wear.
- parineum 4y agoHolds true for a lot of electrical appliances, even lightbulbs. They always blow when you switch the lights on. I'm not sure whether constant running is worse for wear and tear vs power cycling but power cycling is typically what precedes a failure.
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago> They always blow when you switch the lights on. This isn't true at all.
- beebeepka 4y agoI've never had one fail in a different manner. Modern LED bulbs seem to fail differently. I see lots of power delivery issues before they go
- 4y ago
- fortran77 4y agoI really wouldn't trust them to have been run with adequate cooling, or to not have been run at higher clockrates, etc.
- tehbeard 4y agoIve seen some posts/tweets that There are cards exiting the crypto market where failed ram chips on them have just been yanked off the board, as crypto just needs cores not lots of vram, i wouldn't trust it unless very, very cheap to lower my risk.
- torginus 4y agoYeah, I don't necessarily agree. I assume many miners didn't run these cards in temperature controlled server rooms, but in places like abandoned warehouses in south-east Asia, with high ambient temps and humidity, which can destroy electrical components. And even if they did, the capacitors in the VRMs of these cards are full of electrolytic capacitors which do degrade over time due to heat and chemical reactions occurring between the plates and the electrolyte as well as the evaporation of electrolyte, they not only age, but age faster over time as the degraded capacitors are put under increased stress. Besides, the assumption of running these cards underclocked and undervolted might not be true - if the folks running those obtained the electricity illegally, or incredibly cheaply, it might make more sense to run these cards hotter. Everything considered, these second hand GPUs are not even that cheap, I saw 5700 XTs going for $250 on ebay, with a comparable brand new 6600 costing about $300. Edit: The fans also have suffered serious wear and tear and are likely to fail. Considering these are often custom, you might not even be able to replace them.
- PeterStuer 4y agoThermal cycling such as is typical in a gaming PC is far more damaging than constant temperatures. Underclock/volting cards to get a consistent higher net yield is standard practice in crypto mining, just as ovectclicking/volting is standard practice in enthusiast gamer circles. The latter being way more damaging for the GPU. Those that obtain the electricity illegally, or incredibly cheaply would not be the ones selling cards now. As for fans, the things that reduce the fan's lifetime the most is dust buildup and high positive pressure configurations. Both of these are typical for bedroom gamer setups. Miner cards run in cleaner environments and open frames. I would definetly buy a GPU from a miner over one from a gamer.
- andrekandre 4y ago> Thermal cycling such as is typical in a gaming PC is far more damaging than constant temperatures. the reasoning is probably pretty obvious, but what i heard is the constant expansion and contraction from heating and cooling the chips and connections is what causes the damage im those cases
- RedShift1 4y agoIs there any evidence that chips degrade in such a way? I've got servers that are 8 years old that ran full bore and they still work fine?
- walrus01 4y agomore concerning is the wear/tear on the fan bearings and the thermal interface between heatsink and board will often be dried out and in poor condition. some gpus are rather hard to get a replacement fan for because it's not like they use an off the shelf modular 60 or 80mm 12vdc fan.
- yardie 4y agoThe GPU makers aren’t exactly making fans in-house. There is probably a seller on AX with the exact part needed. I’ve had great luck in finding replacement parts for pretty niche hardware.
- walrus01 4y agoif the fans aren't sold by newegg and its top ten largest US domestic competitors as standard sized items - i would consider them as rare weird items, because the size, shape and mounting of the blower is often unique to each card. not going to play games with something I have to order on aliexpress and wait 6 weeks for it to maybe show up from china.
- KennyBlanken 4y agoMost of them are 95mm fans. You can get replacement fans on ebay for almost any relatively common GPU because most of these fans come from the same places and the companies that make the fans for the GPU manufacturers long ago figured out there was a market for replacement units. The higher end card companies in some cases will just ship you a replacement fan if your email to them is pleasant. Or sell it to you for a modest price. I just looked and I can get replacement fans for my specific GPU for less than $20 including shipping.
- wyager 4y agoConstant-on is typically less harmful to the chips than on-and-off. Electromigration or whatever is less of a risk than solder joints going bad.
- runnerup 4y agoCrypto miners actually often run the cards at low wattages and low heat. Because the top 5% of performance requires like 30% of the energy. So you can reduce your marginal cost (electrical bill) by 30% while only decreasing your revenue (mining) by 5%. Gamers are the ones destroying GPU's, not professional miners who tune their systems properly.
- gaudat 4y agoBut they stress the hell out of the VRAM coz mining is limited by memory bandwidth. There are reports on 2nd hand video cards from miners getting rendering artifacts after only a few days of gaming.
- danachow 4y agoIt’s not like this memory use actually causes wear and tear though - DRAM doesn’t involve some irreversible process like Flash does. At the end of the day it is still the same slow thermal death - mining just means the RAM is more prone to overheating than the GPU. And yes it’s hard to know after the fact how the RAM has been treated - but if the RAM is properly cooled it should have no wear just due to use.
- dragontamer 4y agoAll transistors wear out the more you use them. DRAM is pretty durable but the controller, bus pins, and other parts would be the wear/tear in my opinion. Those other bits inside the DRAM could very well wear out.
- 7speter 4y agoAlso the gddr6x that’s used on the higher end ampere cards (3070ti and above) are known to get really hot
- danachow 4y agoThat transistor wear is going to be on a timescale far longer than at issue here - the silicon aging effects referring to will take place over decades of full time for use at low operating temperature - none of these graphics cards are anywhere near that old.
- derefr 4y agoWhy not? Embarrassingly-parallel problems (of the kind you'd use a GPU for) are a perfect use-case for enhancing fault-tolerance through redundancy (i.e. running your program on three cards at once and only accepting the output if they all agree.) The only place this doesn't apply is gaming, where you're trying to get realtime interactive results while economizing on both cost and energy. But for every other use of a GPU, you can't go wrong with "throwing more compute at the problem."
- caymanjim 4y agoI don't think anyone is suggesting you should buy a used one. The fact that crypto miners are dumping them likely indicates that they aren't going to buy the new ones up. It could mean they're just rotating stock, but given crypto prices, more likely means they're giving up and dumping assets. This should free up new stock for the rest of us. I'd buy a used one if the price were commensurate with the risk. Say 20% retail.
- nixass 4y ago>I'm not an expert This
- WithinReason 4y agoLot of info in this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T0npiqjEWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T0npiqjEWQ Apparently GDDR6X and HBM memory might degrade from Ethereum mining