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The only problem I have with miners is that I don't understand the economics. My understanding is that air conditioning in data centres is a non-trivial cost. S

The only problem I have with miners is that I don't understand the economics. My understanding is that air conditioning in data centres is a non-trivial cost. So the question is pretty much a balance of: Is air conditioning so expensive that it's cheaper for miners to blast these cards at high temperatures and accept a failure rate, or is the maths behind (cost * mean time between failures) so high that the miners are actually selling off good used equipment. You could tell me that either of those things dominate, I don't know. But I would want to have atleast an idea of this before I bought a used miners GPU. Having said that, I wouldn't buy a gamer's old GPU.

latchkey 4y ago
The economics are simple: capex + opex. As long as you have an idea of ROI and can lower the cap+op as much as possible, you're making money. Otherwise, you're buying the coin directly. You can't run the cards at high temps or they crash. They also have built in thermal protection where they shut down at about 85c (depends on the settings). Miners also undervolt/underclock the cards. Lower power is better for opex in the equation above. =) This means they aren't run as hard as you might think. ethash as an algo is also memory hard, so the GPU portion isn't 100% at all. That's why older cards are still in use and more ROI efficient.