Does 2 Years of Mining Ruin A Graphics Card? 

I just picked up a used Windforce OC 1080 for $320 after it was used for mining for about 6 months. The guy invited me to his house, showed me what was left of his mining rig, gave me the receipt and said to bring it back if anything goes wrong. The card works fine and he didn't even try to kill me. 10/10 would risk death for a cheap used 1080 all day.

ok, now remove this video so that I can get a cheap 1080 before people see it and bid against me

Electronics do not degrade in such a way which end use performance would be affected, they do degrade in a way where it will suddenly stop working usually with no symptoms.

I mined on my ps2, it was fine after 2 years but i only made $32

As long as the miner changed his oil frequently and was easy on the transmission it should be fine.

It doesn't ruin the card. It does...under-mine...the longevity though.

electronic is not mechanic, you cant tell life span of an electronic item by its performance.

This didn’t age very well🤣 hopefully Keith is a millionaire by now

I actually kinda like the orange 1060 looks cool

I feel like him touching them up like that is doing more damage than most of its time mining and gaming lol.

My god. When i imagine how a miner looks it looks exactly like him.

I got my antminers at IMINERS,CO and they are great group of people. Miners are new, support is insane, shipping is fast and they provide wholesale discount. My recommendation to

SUPER simple, barely an inconvenience ...... **I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE** :)

Wait for it... wait for it... GET OUT OF MY CHAIR!!!

man thank you so much for going straight to the point. that's surprisingly extremely rare on youtube these days.

I have 5 years of mining on my HD 7850. Amazing card still, golden-sample that OCs to 1250mhz core when on water and 1499 memory. Still plays games great and the only problem is the fan self-destructed from eating a molex connector, so I got a different fan on it, back on air for convenience of moving systems its on.

I like that you did this video. I also like that GamersNexus has talked about this in the past as well and mentioned a heavily gamed on card is generally going to be far worse than a heavily mined card.

How did you do those graphs? They’re amazing looking!

This was an interesting topic that you don't see on any other channels. Great job UFD tech.

Also ask if they used a custom bios, and if they did if they reverted the bios back to stock before selling

You will not see a performance difference with mining cards, the issue with mining is that the gaming cards use a board layout optimized for performance and stability at a low cost rather than a demanding constant workload. Usually one of the most common issues you get from mining cards is after a few months to a year or so of use, you may end up with stability issues, such as your display randomly artifacting, requiring you to restart. The issue is not temperature related, it is simply many of the passive board level components end up degrading more and then functioning out of spec, thus the GPU may bet a little more ripple, or a capacitor may have its ESR increase, thus the card may crash or artifact when it needs to suddenly jump to a higher power state.

Where can I find that orange graphics card?!

Great video UFD, I have purchased six mining cards and so far all except one worked great all benchmarks were perfect. one of my cards a RX 580 Red Devil GS had a flickering problem but that was due to the seller cleaning the graphics card with WD40 the lubricant got in between the PCB and the GPU (there is a very tiny space) so the heat was being transferred to the back of the card and causing it to overheat. I cleaned it out (very difficult, used 90% alcohol then had to use dish soap with a high pressure water pulse and jet water flosser) and it works great now.

It depends if it has been running at 85C temperature for 2 years or at 60C to 55C, that makes a huge difference to the life expectancy of the card that will work perfectly fine until it suddenly without warning die... (fans breaking is not a big deal, just put in new). With the default fan profile my Gigabyte Aurous GTX1080ti did run 75C temperature when mining, I installed MSI afterburner and made a custom fan profile that did keep it at 55C to 60C when mining.

Buying used is a gamble. Mining or not there are dumb people that'll choke their graphics card, overclock/volt it, blow the dust off, and sell it as "barely used". Speaking of which I got this LED-less 1070 I'm selling barely used $400.

I used to have no issues buying a used card if it was still under warranty, but I will never ever again rely on MSI for customer service. Five months and three defective replacements later, I still don't have a working card. Buy used, but don't risk MSI.

you guys are very hard workers i love it keep it up

Great video idea! 100% agree with your opinions on this one 😊

Who knew Brett was going to tell Tank to get out of the chair?

disappointed that you didn't see if it's overclocking capabilities were affected, not custom maximum overclocking, but at least it's factory provided Application safe OC limits, i.e. setting power target to the max % and giving the core/memory clock a bit of a boost. I have zero doubt that a card that has been running 24/7 at 100% speed for long length of times would be able to still hit stable factory speeds and perform up to 100%.. but where I would expect to see degradation, if any, would be if you attempted to overclock the card to perform faster than stock speed.

Depends on the card, I once bought a 7950 used for mining a few years back, seemed fine there but was totally unstable over anything more than a few min, mining does destroy cards, parts will start failing, it wont degrade performance, it'll just stop working properly.

Awesome! I bought a 970 that was used for 1 1/2 years straight. The card has been in my rig for about 6 months now running smooth. Thanks to that experience plus this vid I feel more confident in buying a 1080 thats been used for mining.

It's not the performance that degradates, it's the components. And thus the life of the card is reduced.

Watching this guy at 1.5 speed makes my life so much easier

Asus Strix GTX1080 - After 6 months of mining all the time, the card now locks up and crashes the system when gaming. It gets to a certain temp (which is way under normal overheat temps) and locks up. Mining causes crashes after anywhere from seconds to a min or two.. Basically, the card is fried. I can game normally and be ok though. If I mine, the card will basically flip out, then I can't game at all. I'm thinking that the constant 100% and extra temp has fried the thermal paste and perhaps solder on the parts, and now it's thermal tolerance is way less than it should be. I can push it, but I can's push it super hard any more.

Okay so I am correct in saying that the gpu I'm waiting for that has only been mined for a couple of weeks- a month's time will operate like new and for about as long as a new one would?

WAIT - this is a mining related video yet there's almost none dislikes? Cool!

the "REEEEEEE" just made my day. Thank you!

Thanks for the vid. I expect my next card which will I will be getting soon to take me to into the next generation, so an ex mining 1080 will probably do well. Also people if you get one of these cards ask if the card has been flashed back to a standard bios. If the performance is less than expected then you may need to do it yourself.

I'll admit I'm on Tank's side. I bought my EVGA SC 1070 in April 2017 on sale for $375 before the price hike. YOUR videos introduced me to Nicehasher. I made some pretty good money off it for about a year. I even took it out of my main gaming pc used a 4GB EVGA 760 while i had the 1070 in a super low watt i3 dedicated motherboard on a table😃. It cost about .08c a day to power it and making up to $3+ a day! I quit when i wasn't satisfied by how much it was making a day. I returned it back to my main gaming pc. It's been gaming just fine. It was an exciting day when I found a local Bitcoin ATM and withdraw some real cash out of it.

Hahaha you tried three times not to say "let's just jump into it" ala Philip De Franco style but you finally did it at 3:25

Great information! All of my mining cards are running strong. As a mining, I am selling off all my gpu mining rigs, and turning to ASICs miners like alot of other miners out there.

A Zotac (blower) 1080ti miner card worth buying?

Thank you for this video. If someone hasn't already suggested it, it would be awesome to see other graphics cards from 2016 (pre-mining and non-mined) compared to similar mining cards from that same time frame. I'm in the market for a used 1070 after purchasing a brand new rx 470 back in 2016. I didn't have the $ back then to get a 1070 but am in the used market now to get one, especially when you see a used 1070 go for $250 US dollars.

I feel I have to comment,the problem with used cards is that you dont know what temps they were running at before you bought them.In certain places gpus can hit 99% usage and run at 65 to 75 degrees.In other places ,hotter places these cards hit their gpu temp limit and get blazing hot.Talking about 82 degrees to 85 if someone adjusted the temp limit.You're doing simple short benchmarks which dont really mean anything,the only way you can tell if these cards are fine,is if you play a game for about 2 hours or 3.

Still skeptical on those eBay cards... lol

What settings should I be looking to ask when it comes to buying mining gpu

So I have a question. What value is overclocking a graphics card and then undervolting its power... seems like your asking it to do more but then taking power away or leaving it at stock. I get the concept of having it do more with less but do not understand why it's done and how its effective.

I just got an rx 480 for jus 96$ it was use for mining and for that price i think it is worth to take the risk.

What kills electronic components is temperature variation. Mining cards stay at the same temp for 2 years. Gaming cards have a lot of temp variation so I think its actually worst...

Just bought Zotac 1060 3GB AMP last night from a guy who seems to know what he's doing. Went to the guys flat, met his wife and their two little girls, saw the rig and the cards mining. Best case scenario. Ran a few tests, played some games, all seems to be gr8!

problem is you can't really tell if the pcb is repaired unless you remove the cooler which iis problematic if you want to return it

"Exactly about the same" - UFD Tech 2018

Personal opinion...confirmed! :P TY!

I've bought 2 pre mined cards: a Club 3D R9 380 4Gb which ran awesome until I sold it for an RX 580 and an EVGA 1080 Ti FE with an EVGA 1080 AIO attached (plus 2 years of warranty left). Both cards were treated very well by the previous owners and I updated my 1080 Ti with the proper EVGA Ti AIO cooler kit and she's still working great! I would buy miner's cards all day as long as they were treated decent, just like a gaming card that was treated decent.

Nice information guy, thanks

The question is not about the mined cards but rather about how can you make sure that the person selling knows what he's doing with his mined card. Few months ago I managed to grab 1080 for like 50% MSRP from a desperate miners (probably lost his money due to crypto crash) and it still running well till last month. I sold it, because I'm on 2200G and 1080 vs 1060 6gb barely makes any difference in my rig :p Sold my 1080 to get me 1060 6gb and the "profit" left is going to be for AMD 7nm CPU later. I was lucky tho, the seller knows what he's doing and the 1080 I bought was used for a year or so with a year warranty left. Now, if you don't know the seller; what he's doing, what settings he used, what temp his card running at etc etc, just don't buy it. Skip it, don't risk it. Keep your money for the 20xx series or next AMD GPU. That's much of a deal than getting a mined card from irresponsible miners. Now, if your friend(s) happens to be miner, don't shy away. Ask them their 1080s :)) *One of my friend is a miner, asked him bout his 1070 but he was like "Sure, I'll sell it if you bought all (12) of them" sonuvabiatch :))

i hate minners they completely ruined prices and where the cause for the graphics card shortage

I mean you can predict failure rates of specific failure types based on knowledge of how the board (or graphics card in this case) was run. Temperature dependant failures (such as oxidation reactions etc) can be estimated for these cards. If you have knowledge of the current to specific parts and what they are rated for you can utilize black's equation as well. You'll be dealing with means and averages though that may not apply to individual units, but I don't feel this is a very different situation from buying anything used. In fact in those type of situations I'll probably get (after asking of course) even less useful information about the usage style of the card. Buying second hand electronics in general is a bit of a gamble but not necessarily a bad one on the cost savings front

Good day, good vid. I appreciate the info. I am a beginner. Would you know where to buy used GPU's especially in South Africa?

aaand this is the reason i got a mined 1080 ti for 450 dolla! thank you filthy miners!!!!!!

Just bought mining 1080ti for 400$ a month ago

does he use stock setting? no under clock the card?

Is performance degradation from just normal usage (no matter how much you use it) even possible? The chip will work or it won't.

My Ex-mining GTX 1080 Ti runs great and when i bought it, it still looks pristine because the previous owner always shut down the entire rig to clean his mining rig every 2 weeks and change the thermal paste every few months to all his GPUs. i had seen worse "ex-gaming" card that sit on a case without proper maintenance for years.

This is why I hate these videos about mining card comparison. They want to test degradation but pick the wrong way when comparing it. Mining card does not have "performance degradation" but what degrading them is the card "longevity" or "lifetime" particularly the electronic components. You could build a working circuit with degraded components like bloat capacitor or melted IC and it still working fine but that circuit going to run for few minutes before blowing up, which is what a mining card is. What they should do is to dissemble the mining card and check 1 by 1 the circuit and electronic components, identify any leaking or defects or fault on the electronic components.

Good info, thanks.

Updating my post from last week. I just sold the 1060 and bought a 1070 that was mined for a year. Runs excellent so far!

I've always been less worried about performance degradation and more about longevity degradation. Even with reducing voltages and lowering clock speeds, these cards are still running 100% of the time, which undoubtedly should make up for any gains from making them underperform. My worries isn't "Will it perform as good" it is "Will it last as long as if it weren't a mining card." Which I get isn't just as simple as "X was used in mining, Y wasn't."

This was all a sham for Tank to sell his card. I KNEW IT!

I found a 1060 for about $200 used, they claim it aint for mining , still has a 2 year warranty , would it be worth to buy it ? Can stores tell if a card was used for mining and thus reject an exchange if it breaks?

Very useful! Bought a 2nd hand GTX 1070 which I presume was used for mining! I wonder if replacing the thermal paste will allow a higher overclock? Have you ever tested that?!

No one argues against a mining cards performance loss or lack of, that's not the issue, its the longevity behind the card that has been kept at 100% for the cards rated lifetime...

2:07 THAT is the general gamer's attitude towards miners :)))))

This is a great video i love it. I like it coz its relevant to us budget gamer keep it up proud of you

Idk about this test. I mean, shouldn't you have tested the max OC on both cards 2 years ago and see if it could still reach these values today?

A mining card won't run slower, but every part of the card has limited amount of power cycles and/or full load hours in it. Mining card will just fail sooner than a gaming card.

Yeah 2 years of mining with ur red and black msi gpu will turn it into an orange galax gpu

Always try to get the original invoice for a used card--it ensures that you'll have access to that warranty.

I have had a1050 ti for a year and want to upgrade but idk if i should get a 1070 or 1080. Real quick, i play fortnite overwatch and forza horizon 4. But im a moderate gamer. Any advise. And im super cheap so i think imma upgrade on Black Friday.

Hideous orange 1060 Linus likes it

VOTE FOR BATMAN

What's the price of an EVGA 1080Ti card that was used for mining?

Do you recommend that I buy a graphics card 3060 EVGA that will mine for a year at a cheap price from my friend? Thank you

May all the miner's burn in hell for eternity.

I personally had 13gpus mining for 4 months non stop and out of 13 cards 5 of them had problems with the fans, while gaming there are random artifacts and 3 of them just gave up and died. 24/7 usage at 100% will hurt almost any technology. Some cards will survive longer than others.

Picked up an MSI mining 2080ti for $700 back when the reference cards were selling for $1200. Thing runs like a dream and I couldn't be happier. The seller claimed that they underclocked it, but as an ebay purchase, kinda hard to verify.

Bought a mined 1070 a month ago with 2 years warranty left. Changed the paste and the thermal pads because the pads were leaking oil "EVGA" and gave it a isopropyl bath. Runs and looks like new.

What happened to Hawt Nuz?

lol no one in the right mind would say "performance degradation" if a card dies, dies no lower performance... i'm not saying the cards are ok... they might have problems but there is no such thing as "performance degradation"

when a GPU die you can't repare it by remake some (micro)-welding or something like that ? Change the vendirad if he die or the radiator etc ...

another question is, how long will it live after it's been mining non stop for 2 years?

I don't think Nvidia card is the issue. The bigger problem lies at AMD card as they are usually modded more than Nvidia one for the purpose of mining. Nvidia at most is frequency and voltage tweaking but AMD can go BIOS mod which seriously mess up the timing and causes hardware failure like dead BIOS ROM or display noise. It will be glad if you can make a video on AMD cards as well, I believe there will be degradation.

Just go and buy a used card even if it is used for mining

Love it!! Been waiting for someone to do a vid on this!! Great job guys as always... Tank GTFO out the char!!!😜😜😜

how much you want for the 1060? And will you and the guys sign it? I live in the states and have enjoyed the channel for some time and I would love to score that card.

Tank owes NO APOLOGIES! Mine and Game like a BOSS TANK!

Far as I'm concerned, cards used for Crypto mining being re-sold on the market are just as good as selling stolen and/or intentionally abused goods. It still angers me that everyone seems to magically forget about way back when bitcoin was still viable on GPU's, and one couldn't get the $4*0~ MSRP R9 290X for anything less than $900, only for ASICs to make that irrelevant and tons of sketchy second-hand sales passing on ruined cards that basically die within a week of the card changing hands. It first angers me how many forgot how bad the situation was back then, and how people act like this wave of it was some kind of new thing. But I'm just as angry at the miners who bought them up by the truckload ensuring that nobody could ever get the cards for anything less than triple the MSRP. Without their factor into it, those GPU's should have been at a third of their MSRP nowadays, and nvidia should have hurried out the RTX a year ago. We should have already been talking about 2nd gen RTX if not for said miners slowing everyone down. And it's *always* the shadiest pricks who do crypto mining that sell their GPU's for suspiciously attractive prices on ebay and amazon, all to continue fueling their attempt at a get-rich-quick scheme that obviously didn't pan out. The worst offender was a local craigslist that was selling from a lot of over *two thousand evga 1070's and 1060's* that were used for mining out of some rented warehouse space in Phoenix. That's where I basically drew the line, because the photos showed them stacked 20 high with literally no breathing room for those cards to work correctly by the time they pass on to anyone else. It made my blood boil.

what about mining used bios modded gpu? i saw these rx480s being sold at around 150$, i want to grab one but i'm not sure of it being "bios modded" and i don't know a thing about mining

Will the results be the same when the bios is changed??