Used/mined GPUs lose 10% / yr ?

[Brian_B]

Second-hand GPU lottery: Mining cards lose 10% performance every year

GPU manufacturer, Palit Microsystems, is advising against joining the lottery of buying a second hand graphics card used for mining.

www.pcgamer.com

Hmm, I saw this, and I have to say I'm skeptical. As much as I despise mining...

The first is the source - a AIB provider (Palit). They want to sell new GPUs, the gray market hurts them. So there's a very obvious motif for saying this. That, and miners tend to undervolt cards, the memory controllers on them get thrashed, but the GPU sees relatively little action.

That said, maybe there is something to it - running the silicon for days on end... your going to see the obvious mechanical issues with the fans and deterioration in efficiency in the cooling fins due to dirt/fouling. Probably also have issues with thermal compounds.

But 10%? Hmm.. I can't think of any system I've owned where, at stock, it's significantly lost performance year over year. I've seen overclocks drift down over time, and I've had issues with overtemp just because I need to clean out cat and dog hair on occasion - but I can't think of an instance where the silicon and mechanicals were still working but I couldn't at least maintain stock clocks.

 

[MadMummy76]

I've had GPUs that failed to maintain stock clocks after a few years of usage, but those were marginal to begin with, meaning they had zero overclocking headroom even when new.

 

[noko]

My 5700XT from the factory had limited memory OCing, 103% and she was stable but that was it. After mining for about 5 months (not really that much for a mining card) anything over stock has issues. To me it degraded some. The Vega's (3x) HBM have held up well with probably over 1.5 year (24/7 that is), no noticeable degradation on either the GPU clock max or HBM. The 1080Ti 2x with over 1.5 year mining also held up well but some max memory degradation but still very easy to OC the memory 300+, GPU speed no change for max.

I would say yes, mining have wear and tear, it is hard to understand how much stress was put on a used card and how well it was taken care of as in proper cleaning, keeping it cool, settings etc. Like all used cards a gamble.

As for 10% performance per year, from my experience that is BS.

 

[Riccochet]

LTT just did a video on this. Tested cards that have mined for 1, 2 and 4 years. No degradation found on the mining cards.

I have 4 1080Ti's, three of which have mined 24/7/365 since 2017. They all still work perfectly for gaming and overclock with no issues.

Palit wants to sell you NEW cards. Not have you buy used cards. Imagine that.

 

[Riccochet]

Put it this way. IF there was silicon degradation due to constant high usage we would have known about it a LONG time ago in datacenters.

Could you imagine the backlash over hosts losing up to 10% of functionality/performance every year? I'd be swapping out blades every 2 years just to maintain N+1.