Best way to stress test video cards used for mining?

I bought a used 280X locally a few weeks ago and I know the guy used it for mining for a couple of months so I ran Furmark for around 8 minutes and did a quick run of Unigine Valley and it was fine. However, while playing games the video driver would crash and the PC would freeze etc. The video card was bad so I did a RMA (thankfully it was approved).

I was wondering if there is a better way to stress test a video card to make sure it's 100% stable for gaming.

Try mining, Uningine benchmarks (on loop), and playing your games with the replacement.


Mining doesn't kill good cards, but it can weed out some of the bad ones.

With all of the power limiters, gaming seems to be the best way tbh. I bought a "open box" asus 7970 which was actually a refurb. Ran furmark fine as well as some other tests. Would artifact pretty quickly in crysis.

It also seems like each type of gpu has a different game or application that will pick up issues more easilly. I've found Heaven to work great with GK104 but not so much with GK110. Crysis always seems to work well for amd cards for me.