4 ms·

My logic would be that these cards are for consumer usage, and mining means 24/7 100% load. So, a year mining would be like 5 years of gaming, and even then you

My logic would be that these cards are for consumer usage, and mining means 24/7 100% load. So, a year mining would be like 5 years of gaming, and even then you gamed 5 hours a day, every single day! So, mining might not destroy cards, but it's heavy use. I think the used goods buyers' attitude is similar to those in the car market. Never mind the miles, if a car had heavy users, like a pizza company's delivery vehicle, it looks different in the market than a garage-stored family car used to visit the relatives.

latchkey 4y ago
There is no such thing as 100% load in ETH GPU mining. The bottleneck is the memory controller, not the GPU itself. That's why 5+ year old cards are still more ROI efficient than the latest greatest cards. The only way to speed things up is to speed up the memory. Other algos take advantage of more of the GPU side of things as well. ProgPoW, if it had passed, would have done that. From what I understand, RVN also does as well... and uses more power too.
hansvm 4y ago
Counterpoint, heavy use mostly doesn't apply to solid-state devices (much how the expected lifespan of an incandescent bulb is independent of its previous usage), and to the extent it would matter the effect is probably dwarfed by not being stuck in a gaming PC full of dust and experiencing constant thermal shock as the games ramp up and down. To the pizza car analogy, when I was in that game I put a hard 60k miles/yr on such vehicles, but I also regularly change the oil, keep great tires and brakes on them, replace bushings and other suspension components at the first sign of issue, etc... Partly because driving that many miles makes issues easy to spot due to familiarity and temporal coherence and partly because it is cheaper to fix many such things sooner rather than later after they've jostled something else out of place. Nobody ever asked if it was a pizza car. I listed it as well maintained and got top dollar each time because it was and their inspections showed that to be true.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  Counter counter point, chips break down over time even though they’re solid state. The flow of electricity through a chip will slowly degrade the metal traces inside it. At the nanometer scale, it doesn’t take much to ruin a logic gate. This is called electromigration. You can care for that car (or chip) all you want, but chips aren’t cars. It’s a slow process, and may not happen on the timescale of mining, but it happens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_aging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_aging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-dependent_gate_oxide_breakdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-dependent_gate_oxide_brea...
- AceJohnny2 4y ago
  > heavy use mostly doesn't apply to solid-state devices It kinda does. The effects are small, but increase as the fab node gets smaller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration
- falcolas 4y ago
  > heavy use mostly doesn't apply to solid-state devices Sorry, but this is pretty much incorrect. Copper migrates, even in solid state devices, and those copper migrations cause breaks and shorts, which cause errors and failures. The smaller the scale, the faster this happens. There is absolutely a MTBF even for solid-state devices. This entire slide deck is worth the perusal, if only for the "whoah, that actually happens?!" moments. But here's a relevant slide for this claim: https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/ObservedFailures37.html https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/Observed... The money quote: "Commercial semiconductor road maps show component reliability timescales are being reduced to 5-7 years." (with attribution) Another fascinating slide is this one, which shows how an IC can start to have a timing issue after being in service for a time. https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/ObservedFailures35.html https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/Observed...
  - latchkey 4y ago
    We've definitely seen 'memory go bad'. But, our failure rate is in the single digits, across a huge sample set across multiple years and in relatively extreme conditions (4 seasons, outdoors). If you're buying something for like half of retail and rolling the dice on it, I think it is a fair bet. Even if you only get 1-2 more years out of a card that has been used before (for any purpose), then you've done well.
    - d_tr 4y ago
      Half of retail (which is still high) for a mining card with expired warranty? No thanks.
      - latchkey 4y ago
        Ok, $10, but you have to pay for shipping and min order is 10k. ;-) For clarity, because @derac is confused below... this is a joke. Hence the winky face.
    - derac 4y ago
      Your incentive is to propagandize this point. you have 100k+ cards to sell on the market, by your own admission.
- ithinkso 4y ago
  > (much how the expected lifespan of an incandescent bulb is independent of its previous usage) Either I'm reading this sentence incorrectly or there is something else I don't understand. How can that statement be true?
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    It's possible if you have a completely flat failure rate. For every time unit spend it has x% failure rate. An example is a piece of rock on the side of the road. Everyday it has a small chance to be smashed by a car. But that chance doesn't increase or decrease over time. Unless external factors change Whether it's true for light bulbs I don't know.
  - HenriTEL 4y ago
    I guess the bulb does not degrade over time, it just break at some point when some random events occur.
    - ithinkso 4y ago
      I don't think that's true, the filament evaporates (sublimes?, sublimates?) from the heat and eventually it is too thin to support itself and breaks. That's how I always understood the main failure mode of incadescent bulbs and that's why the above statement confuses me
garaetjjte 4y ago
On the other hand 24/7 usage means no thermal cycling, probably eliminating failures caused by solder joint cracking.
- latchkey 4y ago
  The machines reboot a lot for auto tuning. Plenty of thermal cycling that happens in all temperatures. Still didn't see any issues. PSU's, on the other hand, are mostly hand soldered in China and have all sorts of issues.
  - Scramblejams 4y ago
    Who/what do you like for PSUs for operating in that harsh environment?
    - latchkey 4y ago
      We've run a ton of different PSU's. Everything from super cheap no-name chinese stuff to refurb/tested high end HP server class. None of them are super reliable.
yieldcrv 4y ago
undervolted use because not every processing component needs to be used very different than a car but valid questions to ask to whoever you are buying from used
Gordonjcp 4y ago
The garage-stored car will be a bag of shite, though. You'd be far better going for the delivery vehicle.
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
I trust mining GPUs a lot more than gamer owned GPUs tbh. Better ventilation, severe undervolting, not even maxing the gpu itself and the fans are not actually spinning that fast.

latchkey 4y ago

There is no such thing as 100% load in ETH GPU mining. The bottleneck is the memory controller, not the GPU itself. That's why 5+ year old cards are still more ROI efficient than the latest greatest cards. The only way to speed things up is to speed up the memory. Other algos take advantage of more of the GPU side of things as well. ProgPoW, if it had passed, would have done that. From what I understand, RVN also does as well... and uses more power too.

hansvm 4y ago

Counterpoint, heavy use mostly doesn't apply to solid-state devices (much how the expected lifespan of an incandescent bulb is independent of its previous usage), and to the extent it would matter the effect is probably dwarfed by not being stuck in a gaming PC full of dust and experiencing constant thermal shock as the games ramp up and down. To the pizza car analogy, when I was in that game I put a hard 60k miles/yr on such vehicles, but I also regularly change the oil, keep great tires and brakes on them, replace bushings and other suspension components at the first sign of issue, etc... Partly because driving that many miles makes issues easy to spot due to familiarity and temporal coherence and partly because it is cheaper to fix many such things sooner rather than later after they've jostled something else out of place. Nobody ever asked if it was a pizza car. I listed it as well maintained and got top dollar each time because it was and their inspections showed that to be true.

vineyardmike 4y ago
Counter counter point, chips break down over time even though they’re solid state. The flow of electricity through a chip will slowly degrade the metal traces inside it. At the nanometer scale, it doesn’t take much to ruin a logic gate. This is called electromigration. You can care for that car (or chip) all you want, but chips aren’t cars. It’s a slow process, and may not happen on the timescale of mining, but it happens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_aging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_aging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-dependent_gate_oxide_breakdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-dependent_gate_oxide_brea...
AceJohnny2 4y ago
> heavy use mostly doesn't apply to solid-state devices It kinda does. The effects are small, but increase as the fab node gets smaller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration
falcolas 4y ago
> heavy use mostly doesn't apply to solid-state devices Sorry, but this is pretty much incorrect. Copper migrates, even in solid state devices, and those copper migrations cause breaks and shorts, which cause errors and failures. The smaller the scale, the faster this happens. There is absolutely a MTBF even for solid-state devices. This entire slide deck is worth the perusal, if only for the "whoah, that actually happens?!" moments. But here's a relevant slide for this claim: https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/ObservedFailures37.html https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/Observed... The money quote: "Commercial semiconductor road maps show component reliability timescales are being reduced to 5-7 years." (with attribution) Another fascinating slide is this one, which shows how an IC can start to have a timing issue after being in service for a time. https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/ObservedFailures35.html https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/Observed...
- latchkey 4y ago
  We've definitely seen 'memory go bad'. But, our failure rate is in the single digits, across a huge sample set across multiple years and in relatively extreme conditions (4 seasons, outdoors). If you're buying something for like half of retail and rolling the dice on it, I think it is a fair bet. Even if you only get 1-2 more years out of a card that has been used before (for any purpose), then you've done well.
  - d_tr 4y ago
    Half of retail (which is still high) for a mining card with expired warranty? No thanks.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      Ok, $10, but you have to pay for shipping and min order is 10k. ;-) For clarity, because @derac is confused below... this is a joke. Hence the winky face.
  - derac 4y ago
    Your incentive is to propagandize this point. you have 100k+ cards to sell on the market, by your own admission.
ithinkso 4y ago
> (much how the expected lifespan of an incandescent bulb is independent of its previous usage) Either I'm reading this sentence incorrectly or there is something else I don't understand. How can that statement be true?
- rowanG077 4y ago
  It's possible if you have a completely flat failure rate. For every time unit spend it has x% failure rate. An example is a piece of rock on the side of the road. Everyday it has a small chance to be smashed by a car. But that chance doesn't increase or decrease over time. Unless external factors change Whether it's true for light bulbs I don't know.
- HenriTEL 4y ago
  I guess the bulb does not degrade over time, it just break at some point when some random events occur.
  - ithinkso 4y ago
    I don't think that's true, the filament evaporates (sublimes?, sublimates?) from the heat and eventually it is too thin to support itself and breaks. That's how I always understood the main failure mode of incadescent bulbs and that's why the above statement confuses me

garaetjjte 4y ago

On the other hand 24/7 usage means no thermal cycling, probably eliminating failures caused by solder joint cracking.

latchkey 4y ago
The machines reboot a lot for auto tuning. Plenty of thermal cycling that happens in all temperatures. Still didn't see any issues. PSU's, on the other hand, are mostly hand soldered in China and have all sorts of issues.
- Scramblejams 4y ago
  Who/what do you like for PSUs for operating in that harsh environment?
  - latchkey 4y ago
    We've run a ton of different PSU's. Everything from super cheap no-name chinese stuff to refurb/tested high end HP server class. None of them are super reliable.

yieldcrv 4y ago

undervolted use because not every processing component needs to be used very different than a car but valid questions to ask to whoever you are buying from used

Gordonjcp 4y ago

The garage-stored car will be a bag of shite, though. You'd be far better going for the delivery vehicle.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago

I trust mining GPUs a lot more than gamer owned GPUs tbh. Better ventilation, severe undervolting, not even maxing the gpu itself and the fans are not actually spinning that fast.