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"Secondary market data shows moderately-used 2 to 3 year old GPUs trading at 50% to 70% of new pricing under normal conditions." That's for good NVidia H100 un
by Animats 3mo ago
"Secondary market data shows moderately-used 2 to 3 year old GPUs trading at 50% to 70% of new pricing under normal conditions."
That's for good NVidia H100 units.[1] There's a shortage of those. That seems to be the price after removal, cleaning, testing and refurbishing. Raw units removed from a shutdown will not be as valuable.
H100 units are available on eBay, but multiple sellers are using the same picture of a new unit in its original packaging, a bad sign.[2] Some even have pictures with the logos of a competitor.
[1] https://introl.com/blog/secondary-gpu-markets-buying-selling-used-hardware-guide-2025 https://introl.com/blog/secondary-gpu-markets-buying-selling...
[2] https://www.ebay.com/shop/nvidia-h100-gpu?_nkw=nvidia+h100+gpu&msockid=3f8b9a1d8ff965f92c9d881c8e9664ed https://www.ebay.com/shop/nvidia-h100-gpu?_nkw=nvidia+h100+g...
- lightbendover 3mo agoWho is buying these at 70% of new pricing given the sky high likelihood of them being shot? Maybe it's safe to buy from small labs that went under quickly, but I can't imagine a cluster that has been operating near its thermal limits for a couple years fetching that kind of resale.
- threetonesun 3mo agoIt was true of crypto GPUs too, although mostly people picking them up for gaming. Always seems high to me too but if you can get any guarantee of them not being on fire when they were pulled the bathtub curve keeps you pretty safe, thermal limits are limits for a reason.
- rxyz 3mo agocrypto gpus didnt run at 100% power draw so the strain wasn't that massive
- azeemba 3mo agoWhy weren't crypto gpus running at 100%?
- dantillberg 3mo agoMost crypto mining on GPUs would use 100% of memory bandwidth, but only a fraction of the compute available. This is a consequence of ASIC resistance of their mining algorithms -- custom silicon can only offer a modest benefit over GPUs if the hard part is memory bandwidth.
- NuclearPM 3mo agoWhy is that true? Can’t you just make more stuff parallel and shrink the ASIC chips accordingly?
- jmalicki 3mo agoNo - inability to do so is part of the design of a good cryptographic hash, quite explicitly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalanche_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalanche_effect
- noosphr 3mo agoSo does llm inference. You're lucky if you hit 40% of the advertised flops.
- metalliqaz 3mo agoI bought a RTX 3070 off a miner when Eth went to proof of stake. It was clean, cheap, and is still going strong for daily gaming. In its working life it was undervolted and probably cooled better than in my rig.
- BizarroLand 3mo agoI got an entire Prebuilt PC when POW ended from a miner. AMD 5950x, 64gb ram, 3090, 2tb SSD, all for $1700. This was 4 years ago when the 3090 was $1500 by itself, and with minor upgrades it's still going strong today. It's wild to think that the system now is worth at least as much as I paid for it then if not much more than that. I saw a similar one going for $2500.
- latchkey 3mo agowe over clocked and under volted... the goal was to lower power and run the clocks as fast as possible.
- Arbortheus 3mo agoI feel like this is not as important as people make it out to be.
- christina97 3mo agoWhy would they be shot? Unlike the consumer cards that are basically factory overclocked to look good on benchmarks, the datacenter GPUs are designed to run at full tilt 24/7 and survive for years.
- Chaosvex 3mo agoGiven the decades of consumer and enterprise GPUs often being identical or near identical hardware, it'd be interesting to see if there's any evidence of this actually being true.
- eru 3mo agoBinning can take in a supposedly uniform stream of chips and produce different tiers on the output.
- bigbuppo 3mo agoAccording to the article these cards have a 9% annual failure rate.
- htrp 3mo ago>The number traces to Meta’s Llama 3 technical report, which documented 419 unforeseen disruptions across 16,384 H100s over 54 days of training, of which 148 were GPU failures and 72 were HBM3 memory failures. From an annualized number on the llama 3 training report. would be interesting to see if we have a better idea given that we're already on rubin.
- christina97 3mo agoIt depends entirely on the time-to-failure distribution though whether used cards are a good deal or not. Often this kind of hardware has a bathtub shaped hazard rate, actually getting burned in cards may mean you get the weeded out solid specimens, and forgo the lemons.
- lmm 3mo agoMost hardware has an exponential (memoryless) failure distribution in practice. The bathtub curve is a myth.
- fwipsy 3mo agoHonest question. Does silicon wear out due to high temperatures, or is it more like lightbulbs where it wears out from thermal cycles? Does it really wear out at all?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- blobcode 3mo agoIt’s mostly due to higher temps resulting in faster ion migration, which can cause a breakdown in the structure of transistors, as well as increased wear on the conductors (though this is rarely a dominating factor). Thermal cycling can also cause cracking, which is also a problem. Though there are lots of reason chips fail due to heat, from the wire bonds on pads getting too hot to increased leakage current at high temps.
- Xalutiono 3mo agoFor a long time it was assumed it wouldn't wear out and tbh if you look how long it takes, how rare it is, its not a real issue... besides what intel did with Raptor Lake. This series had massive issues with oxidiation. Was the first time ever i became aware of this issue on scale. Nontheless there are papers out there that silicon can degenerate and does.
- high_na_euv 3mo agohttps://research.google/pubs/cores-that-dont-count/ https://research.google/pubs/cores-that-dont-count/
- walrus01 3mo agore: your last paragraph, there's probably only about 30 to 40 (at max) reputable relatively high volume dealers of used/refurb ex datacenter server equipment dealers on ebay that are located in the US48 states. It would be very risky in my opinion to buy a used GPU or multiples of GPU from some rando who has 14 feedback. If you search ebay for server equipment like a Dell R840 with 768GB RAM, the same sort of dealers who are selling that and have thousands of feedback (at 98.5% of greater rating) are the ones I would consider much less risk.