What is the most accurate method of determining if a card has been devastatingly mined on?

[Ottonomous]

Besides watching the temps, freq/volt. curve, checking the fan bearings? Is there some record of usage that's retrievable from the card in a similar fashion to a BIOS pull? There has to be otherwise their grounds for voiding warranty would be meaningless

 

[psolord]

Manufacturers should add a SMART like feature on graphics cards, so people using them for mining, shove them down their throats, when the bubble bursts, like it has recently. They should also impose zero warranty for miners on gaming cards and sell special mining cards instead.

 

[Elfear]

The overwhelming majority of miners undervolt their cards so the hardware itself doesn't take that much of a beating. The only wear and tear I'd be worried about is with the fan bearings and you should be able to hear any imminent issues there (squeaking, abnormal noise, etc.). Although even the fans shouldn't be too bad since they don't have to spin up as much to cool an undervolted card.

I sold off 16-17 mining cards and all the fans sounded fine after 1-2 years of continual use.

 

[RichUK]

Check for coal dust?

 

[thilanliyan]

Yeah miners usually undervolt/undervolt for efficiency. Fan is really the only worry I would think.

 

[gorobei]

depends on the mining setup.

on the Louis Rossman YT channel, he does pc repairs and is a massive critic of apple's policy of making customer repairs nearly impossible. he got his hands on an btc asic miner that failed. the failure point were some surface mount components that corroded due to being too close to the ac cooling output with no humidity mitigation. home miners wont face this problem, but if you dont know where a card came from there are no guarantees.

 

[IntelUser2000]

The overwhelming majority of miners undervolt their cards so the hardware itself doesn't take that much nded fine after 1-2 years of continual use.

Yea, in home miners are not that bad. We generally only have a few so we can take extra care of them. If its a mining farm them it'll be extremely difficult to do that for thousands of cards.

Not only I run my cards at 63C, I clean them every 2-3 months so the fan doesn't have to run so hard. I make sure to ground myself before handling the cards and try to avoid touching any parts of the PCB to further minimize it.

 

[Shmee]

Just check the condition and the fans I would say. If buying used locally, try doing a test run for stability if the seller will let you. Just check for dust, wobbling fans, and basic stability in games/apps. That is generally the best you can do.

 

[IntelUser2000]

It's always the BIG businesses screwing up things for everyone.

-Big shops bankrupt small shops, and ruin towns.
-Big corporations also give the impression business owners are all greedy evil owners when small/medium businesses are the ones that employ most of the population.
-Big mining farms absolutely flood the used card market without telling you the condition ruining it for home miners.

 

[Charlie22911]

The fans are the only part of a GPU I'd be concerned about, and if you are buying a card with high quality fans with ball bearings I'd even go as far as saying it is probably a non-issue.
These cards are run at a constant load in a mining environment, which may sound bad on the surface; you must realize this means they have very limited thermal cycling which is favorable. They are also in the majority of cases underclocked.

Be aware however that on the AMD side it is common for folks to flash modified BIOSes that alter memory timings and clocks\voltage for higher efficiency, which may be detrimental to gaming performance. It is however relatively easy to flash them back with a BIOS from the techpowerup database.

 

[Headfoot]

I would rather buy from a miner, who says they are a miner and likely did undervolt and take care of their device (e.g. profit incentive to do so) over a "gamer" who probably mined anyways and overclocked the balls off the card and isn't telling you either of those facts.

 

[psolord]

We should also examine which cards are more likely to have been used for mining. I mean AMD's cards were better at mining afaik and also Nvidia's cards with gddr5x were not preferred for mining. I mean the 1070 was better than the 1080 right?

 

[Elfear]

We should also examine which cards are more likely to have been used for mining. I mean AMD's cards were better at mining afaik and also Nvidia's cards with gddr5x were not preferred for mining. I mean the 1070 was better than the 1080 right?

Correct. If I had to guess the most popular newer gen GPUs that were used for mining (speaking of volume), I'd say the RX 480, RX 580, GTX 1060, and GTX 1070. Much more accessible price range vs some of the faster mining cards (Vega and 1080Ti).

 

[Arkaign]

As long as the place has a good return policy (Amazon/eBay cover buyers really well if they go through the supplied channels), or you buy directly from an individual that doesn't sound suspicious (someone telling you up front that it was a mining card is more believable than someone with 120 RX480s that says they were only used for light gaming lol), you should be good. eBay buyer protection in particular is basically bulletproof. As an eBay seller, I can tell you from experience that I just have to account for scammers despite running webcam when I'm packing/sealing/shipping. I no longer sell Apple products or more expensive items on eBay, due to "seller sent me X, wrong item, give me money back", while keeping the good item I sent them. Last straw was a $1500 Macbook Pro a few years ago, near mint and full AppleCare, etc. Buyer claimed i sent him a phone book (coincidentally the picture he sent as proof showed a different box/shipping label and a phone book from his city 1800 miles away from me lol). eBay support didn't care, despite 100% positive feedback and years of good standing they debited the full amount from my account and let bad feedback stand. Of course the buyer had literally two previous transactions and vanished about a week later, probably having screwed over a number of other sellers before they moved on to another strawman eBay account.

 

[thilanliyan]

We should also examine which cards are more likely to have been used for mining. I mean AMD's cards were better at mining afaik and also Nvidia's cards with gddr5x were not preferred for mining. I mean the 1070 was better than the 1080 right?

That changed with the release of the EthEnlargementPill.

 

[Ottonomous]

Very interesting replies (and reassuring). Thanks everyone

 

[SirCanealot]

Manufacturers should add a SMART like feature on graphics cards, so people using them for mining, shove them down their throats, when the bubble bursts, like it has recently. They should also impose zero warranty for miners on gaming cards and sell special mining cards instead.

So people that do folding, rendering or encoding on their cards should also have zero warranty?

Interesting theory by the by

 

[PrincessFrosty]

As others have said, many miners under-volt to keep power costs down and so the GPU isn't hit as hard as it would be otherwise.

There really is no guaranteed test that I'm aware of, but what I've found with CPUs and GPUs quite reliably is that chip degradation (typically in my case due to overclocking for long periods) is detectable through severely hindered OC ceiling. The OC ceiling on well worn hardware is typically a lot lower than brand new hardware. Your main problem is that OC ceilings can massively vary in even brand new hardware, overclocking is never guranteed, all you can do is look at what average OC's people get from the same card and compare.

One other tell tale sign with chips running degraded is not just that the OC ceiling is low but adding more power and more cooling does not help, if you're running your chip at say 25Mhz more than stock and no amount of added vcore or max power gets it stable it's almost certainly been under heavy load for long periods or overclocked aggressively. Typically with new hardware you'll run into OC ceilings but dumping in more vcore and max power load will make higher OCs stable again, but with well worn hardware that wont help at all it'll just be unstable no matter what.

 

[NTMBK]

Just buy new.

 

[ozzy702]

If it's a Pascal GPU and they tell you they haven't minded on it, turn around and walk away. If someone with a Pascal GPU told me they mined and quickly showed me their low power settings they used, I'd feel a whole lot better about it, especially if it was an EVGA GPU still under warranty.

At this point it makes no sense to buy an AMD card used since they're so cheap new.

 

[Elfear]

If it's a Pascal GPU and they tell you they haven't minded on it, turn around and walk away. If someone with a Pascal GPU told me they mined and quickly showed me their low power settings they used, I'd feel a whole lot better about it, especially if it was an EVGA GPU still under warranty.

At this point it makes no sense to buy an AMD card used since they're so cheap new.

I was selling my used RX480's for less than half of what a new RX580 costs. Sometimes it makes sense.

 

[HutchinsonJC]

Unless you're going to analyze the bearings of the fans or something, all you have is the trust value you place upon the person selling.

Anyone could show you a profile they claimed to use while knowing full well that's not the profile or settings they used. So again, how much trust do you have with that person?

 

[lixlax]

Just buy new.

Out of my own expierence I totally agree.

Even if underveolted these cards have been stressed 24/7 and its impossible to know when and if a component will fail. After the first Bitcoin bubble I bought a R270, the fans on it had basically failed and it had a special mining BIOS on it which caused instability- that card was in perfect condition according to the seller (I replaced the fans and flashed the BIOS- thankfully I didn't have any other problems with it after). Then I decided to replace it with a 280X which was ex-miner as well, this time I made sure it had brand new fans on it and a normal BIOS (as stated by the seller). Everything was working fine for 2 months until I started having occasional crashes and throwing artifacts (in games), after couple of weeks it was so unstable that it even crashed on Windows desktop. Then I swore to myself that I'll never again buy a used graphics card even if there is the slightest possibility that it has been used for mining (or similar use case).

I think the safest quarantee for the buyer is if the card still has a usable warranty for a meaningful time period.