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It's more temperature variation that kills cards. In a conventional mining setup thermals are monitored and accounted for. A card running at 70C 24/7 will last
by Workaccount2 4y ago
It's more temperature variation that kills cards. In a conventional mining setup thermals are monitored and accounted for. A card running at 70C 24/7 will last a long time. Longer than a card that is constantly bouncing around in temperature.
- latchkey 4y agoAlso untrue. My cards have been running for years in shipping containers that are outdoors and go through full 4 seasons (winter snows to summer heats). Edit: power supplies on the other hand... are a mess. Mostly hand soldered in China... they fail randomly due to the environment they run in. Sometimes, they "die", let rest for a day or two and then fire back up and run just fine.
- TakeBlaster16 4y agoTemperature changes outside don't translate to temperature changes on the die. If the cards are running 24/7 there will be no thermal shock to speak of since they are always generating heat.
- latchkey 4y agoVarious machines reboot randomly all the time. Given the amount of direct outdoor airflow that we push through the machines (we don't have fans on the GPUs), as soon as the GPUs stop running, they cool down very very quickly. That is the 'shock' you're looking for. Why do they reboot? We run on the edge of peak OC tuning performance by default and I've built an automated tuner which downclocks individual cards. This way, they get more stable over time, while maintaining their best possible performance. Occasionally, we would reset the tunings and then let them auto tune back... this accounted for the seasonal variances because hotter cards are more prone to crashing.
- TakeBlaster16 4y agoHow often does the average machine reboot? If it's less often than 24 hours you're still putting the card under less thermal stress than someone who games for a half hour every evening. I'd buy your used GPU over a gamer's used GPU
- latchkey 4y agoSometimes it can reboot 50+ times in a row. Each box has 12 gpus, so if I reset the tuning for the box, it can take a while to find the optimal settings because the voltage/clock tuning steps are very granular. Again, this isn't an actual issue and I have the data to prove it.
- TakeBlaster16 4y agoFair enough, I'll defer to your experience. Although if you're power cycling that much, I take it back, maybe I won't buy your cards :)
- latchkey 4y agoNo, you want my cards because I've proven that reboots/thermal changes don't make any difference. =) You wouldn't want my cards, because they don't have fans. Most people don't have adequate cooling for something like that.
- mlyle 4y ago> That is the 'shock' you're looking for. It may still be a lot less 'shock' than normal use, where players have a 15 minute round, then low use for a couple minutes, etc, for hours.. and then turn the card off. Thermal cycling is known to be bad for electronics-- this is well studied and documented. Sustained high temperatures are also bad, but it's only really bad when the temperatures are really high.
- latchkey 4y agoI'm pretty sure my cards have gone through all extreme different load situations that you could possibly make up in your head. Certainly, thermal cycling can be an issue for electronics in general, but my experience with these specific cards says that it isn't an issue at all. At least certainly not as much as something that should dictate purchasing 'miner' cards or not.
- jiggawatts 4y agoSince you would know about every possible failure mode… Do you know what causes NVIDIA cards to have their output turn off (black screen) and the fan to go 100%? Been happening to my 2000-series recently but I don’t know what to try to fix: cooling, PSU, or capacitors…
- latchkey 4y agoMy primary experience is with AMD cards. My guess is a vbios or driver bug. You could also be running into a tuning issue. GPUs are amazingly complex beasts.
- KennyBlanken 4y agoMiners overclock and overvolt the memory because there's a substantial performance advantage to doing so with little efficiency loss. This rapidly ages the memory. Also, 70c is well into the temperature range that will significantly age capacitors.
- Workaccount2 4y agoI would hope performance GPUs are using 105C caps. At a 30% derating they should last almost 10x as long as at 105C.
- KennyBlanken 4y agoHigh end cards, maybe. My point stands: a capacitor that spends most of its life at room temperature except for a few hours at ~60c is going to last significantly longer than a mining card which spends 24x7 at 60-70c, regardless of temperature rating.