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Between scalpers and cryptocurrency miners, its been really tough to buy a graphics card. But soon, we could see a flood of used mining GPUs hitting the market- possibly at some pretty attractive prices. But should you buy a second hand GPU that’s been used for crypto mining?
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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo – Supernova
Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKfxmFU3lWY
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Outro: Approaching Nirvana – Sugar High
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CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
1:55 Background Info
3:15 Test Setup
4:10 Test 1 (10 months)
4:49 Test 2 (18 months)
7:12 Test 3 (4 years)
7:56 Conclusion
8:13 Buying Tips
10:48 Outro
37 Comments
I think it's not the mining that makes it slower but using it a lot that makes it slower because mining is software related not hardware
1:11 i am sorry, what? GPU's on a shelf, is that some schrodingers gpu card joke?
Revisiting this video after those clown lip cards crashed and burned. New.
And now we have the LHR unlocker…
Linus the debunker of fake news 👍👏
This was really interessting
yeah I returned mine even it has a lower price
PLEASE Buy a Used mining GPU! – $h!t Miners Say
fixed video titleHey everyone it's 2022 crypto just crashed and I was able to pick up a used 3080 ti for $900 😎 all my waiting since the original 3080 drop has finally paid off.
Second-hand cards period are not a great idea. Having one coming from a mining rig is just a guaranteed risk. Don't be a fool.
still waiting for this "gpu price crash" xd
I can't believe Linus has GPUs sitting around… how can you do that to us?
good to know. but there are more problems about used GPUs than slower core speeds, a very good tip to check on the maintenance thou.. some used ones could be clogged with dust or smell like a smoking bong xD if possible, test them before buying
I call bull because I mined on my gtx1650 laptop and it has not loss any performance and I have been mining 2 years 24/7.
Old, hard running cards don't run slower… they develop artifacts.
linus is always saying the gamers complain when they don’t use the best components in videos but i only ever see commenters complain that he doesn’t ever use affordable components people actually use
I bought GTX 1060 after bitcoin crash in 2018-2019, and it has been working perfectly since.
I bought RX 480, get broken a few month later. It was ex mining.
Either Palid is lying or they use shoddy silicon
Lol, manufacturers made all the gpu shortages up.
Don’t get it wrong, there is a higher demand for pc components and specially gpus, but do you really believe that a decadades old growing market, that showed no signs of desacceleration, didn’t have plenty of time to increase production to reach the demand with fair prices?
Also only GPU prices shoot up when a pc needs a cpu good enough to pair it up, why did cpu prices had a less excentric rise?
Manufacturers are known to have agreements between them before, they saw this as an opportunity to make more profit while building more less the same amount of gpus, they did that years ago with ram modules.
I'd rather see a gpu fan longevity test than a clockspeed test.
if you use it well its not going anywhere and i BS you not im still using my GTX 260×2 and OC
Bought my second hand mining 1080ti at the start of the pandemic in 2020 for half the price of brand new 2 years on and a lot of gaming later its still going strong
HMM.
Who is here after the crash and finally gaming on a new level? RTX 3070 ar market in my new beast!
Apples to apples comparison would be a mined used GPU against a non mined used GPU but not stuck in a shelf/box but in a daily used pc with ocasional gaming.
Every GPU I've ever owned worked better after mining.
What about VRAM errors? Run OCCT to check vram, some old Dell motherboards would have thorough VRAM checking in ePSA
I'd like to thank the guy who stole me a well-loved RTX 2060 used last year. He took good care of it, and it beats the snot out of all the "lowly" 1080p gaming I do. Was a great deal for both of us in trying times. Thing is flawless. And less e-waste!
Yep! Know the risks, but it can turn out fine.
i bought an 3090 ti for 200 bucks 😅
if anything, i would recap a heavily mined card 2+ years and not even worry about it for the rest of its lifetime
May be an old video but there is a website out there selling a used 3080 for a little lower than 100 bucks that I'm skeptical of
"AFOXgate" in Brazil??
Nah this is copium for a shit market
Miner card are the best because they was never overclock from the freaking gamer
Filthy filthy miners. (he means crypto miner)
Thats not rumor, how many mining gpu are selling on the market rn, only the worst number you can think of.
Hey, previous full-time mining op manager with a specialization in immersion cooling chiming in here (this'll be a bit longer, sorry) :
Adding to what others have said about fans being the first to go (yep), and more resolute damage such as caps popping, there's actually a MUCH more common failure point than the GPU die:
The memory / VRAM.
Part of my research and bigger 'talking points' if you will about the benefits of immersion cooling in the mining space was the additional resilience (near-immunity) to environmental degradation of hardware. GPUs, ASICs, and FPGAs primarily experience degradation from their environments in the form of corrosion at an extremely small scale. Of the myriad forms of corrosion, the most obvious was due to the humidity in the air, which found lovely nucleation points all over due to the fine dust so common in large-scale mining ops.
And wouldn't you know it, the most sensitive component on the GPUs to this corrosion was the memory. Especially since in most designs the VRAM modules are so exposed to air (rarely being totally covered by a heat sink, and often being on both sides of the board), they would experience corrosion less visible than other spots on the PCB, but more unfortunately more damaging. You would find more visually obvious corrosion around power delivery components, especially the 12v connectors and caps, but these components were usually a fair bit more resilient than memory.
Certain mining algorithms focus more on GPU (compute), and some more on memory (VRAM, both timings and effective clockspeed). In a lot of cases you could end up mining for months or years on a relatively "lax" algorithm and simply ignore or not encounter memory errors that would surely cripple or disable a GPU on another algorithm. In our (LTT viewers) case, we're interested in gaming. Unfortunately, we fall somewhere in the middle as far as compute and memory getting hit goes – a fair balance the GPU is obviously built around.
Best case, a GPU encountered minimal humidity and/or minimal dust, and simply didn't corrode. Worst case, it got an unlucky dose of both and is failing spectacularly shortly after posting.
More commonly however, you end up with only a slightly degraded GPU at a hefty discount that, after a good cleaning, is A-OK to game on. If the GPU is encountering memory errors at all, they're usually few enough that the GPU can actually work around them. (This is something we actually have to occasionally check and account for in larger, more finely-tuned mining ops; the error-rate that is.)
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A few comments discuss thermal cycling as a possible point of degradation for the silicon. A very real and potential problem for even modern hardware, but in our case (as a gamer looking to scoop a mining card), not really a risk in our case. As Linus found in the video, his tests were within margin of error between cards.
A couple people in the comments posited that, under mining conditions, GPUs are largely kept at the same 'target' temperature. This is indeed accurate, and for the most part algorithms are largely constant-loads. It behooves the miners and those developing mining software to find a way to constantly load the GPUs. If you give them time to "chill out" for a moment, they become less stable (under mining overclocks/undervolts). Additionally, almost all mining programs and OSs set a target temperature that is maintained by fan speed updates.
Also a lot of miners undervolt their cards so they're actually running lower power and a little easier.
That said, 24/7/365 workloads of any form, regardless of mitigations, will still wear on a card harder than a gamer who plays, on average, a few or many times a week, for only a few to several hours a day. Especially in the conditions you experience in a mining farm. No air conditioning (so higher heat), dust, dirt, debris, humidity, etc.
So we're far less concerned with thermal cycling and MUCH more worried about the awful environment they're operated in. And this brings us full circle to the degradation I went over above.
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Linus covers it well. Inspect the card if you can.
Do your best to buy from places that have reasonable buyer protections in-place. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
I've actually helped guide farms on their GPU resales and tried to help them clean, test, and – for AMD cards primarily – flash back to a more gamer-friendly vBIOS.
On the other side of things, I've inspected large farms on behalf of potential purchasers and found farms in states of disrepair that ensured their cards would never run properly again – especially for a gamer.