Indeed. On the other hand, if crypto takes a major, major crash and a bunch of 1080 ti's pop up at $400, I wonder if the gamers will sing praises of the noble miner.
Probably not.
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Crypto and gpu price going back
- Thread starter Jalseng
- Start date
Indeed. On the other hand, if crypto takes a major, major crash and a bunch of 1080 ti's pop up at $400, I wonder if the gamers will sing praises of the noble miner.
Probably not.
Depends on how long those 1080 Ti's live on afterwards in gamer hands after they've been mined with 24/7 near 80C.
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Mine ran at 60-65 degrees at most.
Temps are not my worry when it comes to mining cards.
On the AMD side everyone takes the tight timings for the slower memory speeds, then they change the bios so the faster speeds also have these tight timings. They are running memory way beyond spec. Then what are the odds they will flash the bios back to stock before selling? These practices may cause problems.
For Nvidia cards, people seem to run the memory speeds much higher than spec. This type of thing can cause problems long term.
On the AMD side everyone takes the tight timings for the slower memory speeds, then they change the bios so the faster speeds also have these tight timings. They are running memory way beyond spec. Then what are the odds they will flash the bios back to stock before selling? These practices may cause problems.
For Nvidia cards, people seem to run the memory speeds much higher than spec. This type of thing can cause problems long term.
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Deleted member 93354
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The hottest point on most video cards are the VRM's.
Run caps above their 80% spec and they wear out quick. Switching VRM's wear out too from heat. Fan bearings wear out and get noisy. BIOSes don't get reflashed. (And I don't care if you DO reflash yours to stock, I don't know WHOM I'm buying from and what they did)
We don't game 24/7. We game maybe at most 4 hours/day average. So by owning the card, you have accelerated it's useful life by a factor of 6. You have that puppy running hot for a year, that's the equivalent of running it for a 6 years for the average gamer.
I would suspect most miners notice their cards are getting flakey and then roll back the settings and dump them on flee-bay. Their settings are rolled back just enough to give the card a life of a couple months before it completely dies.
I'm not saying you are disreputable. But what do you think of someone's integrity when all they want to do is get rich quick?
I wouldn't touch a used high end card these days for nothing.
So why would we want to touch one of your cards?
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To each their own, I purchased a bunch of used mining 290/290x cards a few years ago, all worked fine, one used 290x had issues and sapphire replaced it(it didn't even come from a miner!)
As far as fans go, I'd agree if the cards are MSI, they are the only cards I have had fans die on, the rest of my fans are running at 60-70%. Anyway, like I said, to each their own. I bought just enough cards that I would use for gaming anyway, so I don't plan on selling them after words, instead I'll use them. IF they die, I'll RMA them.
Plenty of gamers brutalize their cards. Sloppy overclocks, excessive heat, many power cycles...
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Deleted member 93354
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Doesn't matter either way. Used cards can be abused. It doesn't make miners cards any better. But some video cards have a tamper switch you can't undo. That means the mfg knows if it was reflashed and therefore can void your warranty.
And why would a gamer try to dump a high end card unless there was something wrong with it?
Why touch them?
Price.
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Deleted member 93354
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Everyone has an opinion, but objectively, that's the answer. Price. And arguably availability.
Many of the miners on just this forum have purchased new cards greater in value than many new cars. It's not about being cheap. It's about valuation. Ever bought a used car? How about a used house? The fact is you assume some risk in exchange for lower cost of entry. It's legitimate.
heatlesssun
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Huh? Gamers sell their old cards all of the time. I just sold a couple of 1080s that were in perfect working order but just gathering dust so it was better to get $1k for them with ease than to just let them age out, like I do too much stuff already. I REALLY hate selling parts but in the current environment selling higher-end GPUs at reasonable prices (reasonable for today at any rate) is easy.
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Deleted member 93354
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While I'll agree with you to a limit, all used cars by law come with a 1 month warranty in most states. Then you have buyers recourse in court if you were sold a lemon. Then they have to also pass inspection in most states. So at least you know it's safe and drive able.
So while cars break down I can repair a car and seek compensation if a known problem was hid.
No such recourse from a miner I bet.
I buy nothing but used cars for half off that still have a power transfer warranty.
You could offer me a time at 50 cents and I would laugh at you. It's not worth the risk.
heatlesssun
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A Pascal or Vega card should still have some warranty left.
There will be plenty of takers for used working high end video cards at decent prices across many countries, if that ever happens.
Once you have been in the market of dealing with used parts, you understand the risks & the failure rates & generally are fine. The failure rates are a lot less than the doomsayers like to predict & usually there is a price point where the savings for used are worth it.
Either way, whatever works for you. But the nice thing about the free market is everybody gets to see what they are willing to pay for something & the prices float up and down till demand and supply reach a meeting of price points. If a bunch of cheap used Vega 56 / Vega 64 / 1070 / 1080 / 1080Ti cards were to hit the market, there would be tons of people upgrading their low end systems with cards that they could not have previously afforded & most will be just fine.
I think however that unless crypto mining & the Asian gaming market both totally crash, the prices on high end cards used won't plummet anytime soon. There is just too much demand from many sources.
Once you have been in the market of dealing with used parts, you understand the risks & the failure rates & generally are fine. The failure rates are a lot less than the doomsayers like to predict & usually there is a price point where the savings for used are worth it.
Either way, whatever works for you. But the nice thing about the free market is everybody gets to see what they are willing to pay for something & the prices float up and down till demand and supply reach a meeting of price points. If a bunch of cheap used Vega 56 / Vega 64 / 1070 / 1080 / 1080Ti cards were to hit the market, there would be tons of people upgrading their low end systems with cards that they could not have previously afforded & most will be just fine.
I think however that unless crypto mining & the Asian gaming market both totally crash, the prices on high end cards used won't plummet anytime soon. There is just too much demand from many sources.
heatlesssun
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Like a lot of folks here, I've been buying graphics cards for over two decades now. I can't recall one that ever failed while in use, they tend to be very resilient. Of course anything can happen but I doubt used GPUs would sell if they weren't reliable.
graphics cards are solid state devices, if they aren't abused (clock cycles going crazy, rapid increase/decrease in temps, voltage fluctuations) they should last for decades. I still have my 8088 in perfect order, its almost 40 years old. Every now and then still fire up to play some seriously legacy games.
If a card is just on but not being abused, it shouldn't die, ya might have fans go bad, but the silicon, vrm's, etc, shouldn't go bad as long as they are in their rated areas.
Out of the 400+ mining cards I have had in the last year, one went bad, and that card was finicky right out of the box. That is lower than the general industry failure rate . And they have been going 24/7 for close to year now.
If a card is just on but not being abused, it shouldn't die, ya might have fans go bad, but the silicon, vrm's, etc, shouldn't go bad as long as they are in their rated areas.
Out of the 400+ mining cards I have had in the last year, one went bad, and that card was finicky right out of the box. That is lower than the general industry failure rate . And they have been going 24/7 for close to year now.
400. I salute you, sir.
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Deleted member 93354
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Never heard of silicon decay & fatigue have you?
As process nodes get smaller, the ability to burn out silicon increases even with a similar percentage increase in voltage.
In other words a jump from 5 to 5.5 volts is less likely to burn out a chip in the long run than a jump from 1 to 1.1 volts. There are several factors contributing to this including transistor leakage, exponential shrinkage of conductive path coupled with increased current and power density.
The general formula is v * v / r for a general area average. Well with modern cards that r is really low yield and leads high heat density which leads to an early demise.
While components are solid state if they have ever been over clocked or over volted to an extreme, they could be subject to silicon decay with a terminal end life. They might work at 1.2 GHz then get unstable. Then they work at 1 GHz then unstable. Then they just don't work at all.
That's your first clue your card is suffering from silicon decay. Ive seen it over and over and over.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/967383/
So used cards are a crap shoot. I don't care how much someone professes their cards were well cared for. I just don't know the truth as a consumer and won't touch a used card.
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heatlesssun
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Then don't buy used cards. Calling them a crap shot though is vastly overstated particularly if they are still under warranty.
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Deleted member 93354
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Read fine print carefully on all warranties.
Some say if bios is tampered with your warranty is void. Some say warranty is non transferable. Most require original receipt.
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Deleted member 93354
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BTW Intel's soc and atom chips have suffered silicon decay on the memory controller. Those particular models will all fail eventually due to silicon fracturing and burning out.
heatlesssun
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It varies, all the cards I've ever sold that were still under warranty were transferable. It just seems like you're trying to say that the only reason people sell cards is to get rid of something that's defective, or been messed with in some fashion. It may be more on an issue these days with mining but people do sell cards that are in perfect working order that are fine simply because they just don't use them anymore.
If the used GPU market were a "crap shoot" then I think there'd me far fewer people in it. Yes bad things are possible but you're making sound like it's common to buy bad used GPUs and that's simply nothing I've heard before. In a place like this especially there'd be a lot more complaints about if it were that bad.
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Deleted member 93354
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No I'm saying "You don't know the reason they are dumping it, but the likelihood of it being abused is high" Sort of like "The likelihood of buying a used rental (Avis Budget etc) is high for abuse"
You can't argue that someone selling a used card on flee-bay is likely a tech user and therefore more likely to tamper...in a bad way.
Yes I have, my mining cards are all undervolted anyways, so? When you have cards rated at 150 watts going at 80 watts, silicon decay and fatigue is not going to be much of an issue. This is why I would rather buy a used mining card vs used gaming card, mining cards tend to be taken care of very well and used in situations where perf/watt is paramount, that means undervolting cores is a must. My 1070 GPU's don't go past 40C at full tilt. This is with stock fan profiles, if I want to I can drop that down to 30C which is just a 15 F degrees higher than room temp, by increasing my fan speeds to 50% which is still quite can barely hear them over the CPU fan.
The undervoltage: I'm doing on the 1070's is a very large amount too. Pascal is a damn good undervolter on average I can drop around 15% on voltages and still hit 2000mhz. Some cards I can go even more, a 20% drop. So instead of the regular .115 mV, its lower or around .08 mV many times running max.
If you want to talk about power drop with Pascal and mining, I limit the power to the board at 65% with the undervolts, I end up at around 70 to 80 watts per card. Added to this I under clock my memory, on my 1070's -500 mhz, on my 1080's, -750mhz since right now I'm not mining ETH, if I ever go back to nicehash, I would put them back to default on the memory.
With my 1080ti, these settings work for mining too, it does not work for gaming, the undervolts make it unstable in some games I can only get a 10% undervolt.
None of my nV cards have tampered bios, the tools aren't available to do any bios modifications on Pascal or even Maxwell cards that I am aware of.
Also my AMD cards, even though I changed the ram timings on them to make them tighter, its the same bios, and they work better in gaming with those ram timings too. These cards are also undervolted and power limited not as much as my 1070's but still, they only use 100 watts vs the 150 watts at stock. Right now I can remove the modded ram timings too, cause that AMD rig is not mining ETh either and cryptonight doesn't need bandwidth or have any issues with memory latencies, and too has memory underclocked by 500 mhz.
You just can't get the best perf/watt unless you undervolt for mining, the difference we are talking about 50 cents a day per card power usage, vs 1 buck a day power usage. The difference is that much. When making 3 to 4 bucks a day per card, that is a very large amount. I'm sure anyone with mining experience would go the extra mile to undervolt their cards. Its not hard to do it just takes time.
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Deleted member 93354
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I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU DO. I care about the other 99,000 other idiots who may not know what they are doing. You don't know how that card was treated and for how long. How many times do I have to say that? It's like buying a car off a rental lot.
If they have any experience in mining they would do the same as I do, as I stated without maximizing their perf/watt they could be losing as much as 20% of their profits just from the power draw for absolutely no reason what so ever. And if you ever go through the tutorials of settings up mining rigs, they mention all this in there. So if a person is so stupid not to use what others are doing, well then that is a problem on their end. Most miners are much more careful about their hardware, they know the value of what they bought and are trying to get money.
Most well built memory can stand up to a large amount of use for a very long time without ill effects.
I've gone through many thousands of memory DIMMs and have found the used ones that have been in service for several years have the same failure rates going forwards as brand new ones.
Generally if memory (even if used for 3+ years non stop) tests out good on detailed tests, 99% will last for another 5 years or so in use, which is about the same as unused memory which also tends to have about a 1% failure rate.
If you get a used video card that is less than a couple years old & test it very well & it runs good for a month or so, chances are that it will last you many more years of service.
The main thing to go out is the fans, or around the 5 year mark the capacitors if they were cheap ones.
So those who want "New only" have fun... guess what a couple months later that "Brand New Only" card you got is now a lowly used card.... Now when you want to upgrade your 1080Ti to a 2080Ti for better 4K gaming, are you going to be happy if everyone decides to be the same as you and say nope I won't buy it because "New Only"... or are you going to be hoping someone pays you a decent price for your used card when you sell it later on?
A healthy market for used items helps new items get purchased sooner & lets innovation much more quickly enter the market as more can afford newer items at each level by being able to get decent value for their previous items.
Most used video cards, CPUs, memory & SSDs are not sold because they have anything "wrong" with them, rather they are sold because something works better, faster or has more capacity, or is more efficient.
Once I get a used video card, CPU, SSD or memory module in & test it well, I have had very few failures over the years.
I tend to buy stuff that has been run 24x7 for a few years in datacenters and such.
I've gone through many thousands of memory DIMMs and have found the used ones that have been in service for several years have the same failure rates going forwards as brand new ones.
Generally if memory (even if used for 3+ years non stop) tests out good on detailed tests, 99% will last for another 5 years or so in use, which is about the same as unused memory which also tends to have about a 1% failure rate.
If you get a used video card that is less than a couple years old & test it very well & it runs good for a month or so, chances are that it will last you many more years of service.
The main thing to go out is the fans, or around the 5 year mark the capacitors if they were cheap ones.
So those who want "New only" have fun... guess what a couple months later that "Brand New Only" card you got is now a lowly used card.... Now when you want to upgrade your 1080Ti to a 2080Ti for better 4K gaming, are you going to be happy if everyone decides to be the same as you and say nope I won't buy it because "New Only"... or are you going to be hoping someone pays you a decent price for your used card when you sell it later on?
A healthy market for used items helps new items get purchased sooner & lets innovation much more quickly enter the market as more can afford newer items at each level by being able to get decent value for their previous items.
Most used video cards, CPUs, memory & SSDs are not sold because they have anything "wrong" with them, rather they are sold because something works better, faster or has more capacity, or is more efficient.
Once I get a used video card, CPU, SSD or memory module in & test it well, I have had very few failures over the years.
I tend to buy stuff that has been run 24x7 for a few years in datacenters and such.
I have bought used server memory and parts in the past too for my mom's server at her office, she had an old westmere and needed to upgrade it for Windows 64 bit so ended up getting a used matching CPU and doubled up on the ram, never had any issues with them, it still running fine its been 3 years.
I have had more failures out of the box with new equipment than used ones lol.
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Deleted member 93354
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Memory is not the same as gpu silicon. It doesn't have the same power densities and why it's passively cooled.
Data centers also run in spec and we'll ventilated spaces. You get a gaurentee it wasn't abused. In fact cloud companies intentionally underspec power to get more efficiency.
But that doesn't mean shit if you don't know your source conditions.
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Deleted member 93354
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Are you willing to guarantee any card I buy off eBay no matter the seller?
I thought not. You can't speak for what others do without statistical data
Every card dies. Not every card really pwns.
I would not touch a used video card either. While the digital devices can be suspect, it is the analog devices (resistors, capacitors, power controllers, motors....) that concern me more. All analog devices have a finite amount of time they will operate in the specified parameters needed to keep the entire product stable.
In the analog parts there is a wide array of differing quality parts available. Unfortunately, we are not privvy to the exact parts being used on video cards.
In the analog parts there is a wide array of differing quality parts available. Unfortunately, we are not privvy to the exact parts being used on video cards.
If a GPU is out of warranty, doesn't matter if its "new" or "used" its out of warranty. Even if it wasn't even used it will still be out of warranty.
Now if you want to see how miners treat their hardware go over to Bitcointalk and ask there, they will tell you the same things I just did, that is the largest mining community. Better yet go here on [H] mining forum and ask them how they treat their hardware, they will tell you the same things I have been saying.
I can't say every miner out there is doing this, but I can say majority are, every single miner I have talked to over PM on this very forum pretty much has done the same things I have so....... There are a few at least 10 people.
About the seller you buy from, you need to do the research on that, If I buy anything off of ebay, I don't buy items from a seller unless that seller has a 99.9% or higher feedback and has been around for a while with a good amount of sales. So far I have no problems with people like that, even with large purchases.
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Guess what, most likely there is somebody that will be happy to do so & bases their whole business on it.
Go add a used card to your shopping cart on eBay and see if it tries to pop up the "warranty" from their current preferred 3rd party company for an extra cost.
Those 3rd party warranty companies make good money running the numbers on what will fail & when.
If you don't like used items for some reason, great, fine, enjoy, no problem at all, new video cards can be had every day if you are willing to pay current market rates & / or hunt around a fair bit, or wait for the next generation.
It's good for the market to have people that want new only like you as then you'll always be buying new & keeping the supply of used items flowing.
But by the same token there are many of us who know the used market well & understand the risks & cost benefits & have first hand experience with new & used parts over many years & have our own comfort level with used items based on seeing many items over the years and tracking long term usage & failures.
In the example of video cards, the prices for used cards tend to go down with age due to obsolescence more than anything else. By the time you actually have to worry about component failure which is in the 5 year of usage range, most used video cards are in the bargain basement cost department and at the price level of buy a bunch and if a couple fail no issue.
If I was buying a video card for me personally because I needed to save money, I'd actually prefer to buy it from a professional miner who showed off the nice open air rig he was using it in, rather than some unknown gamer trying to max it out in his hot case for benchmark fun. All I need is a 30 day or so warranty & by then I'll know if it's going to statistically last me a few years or not.
RC-Heli-3D
Limp Gawd
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To be honest, I am actually turned off by the prices on these video cards. It makes no economic sense even if you are mining.
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the vrms will probably die first on cards that have been mining if the said card has been crammed in between a number of other cards.
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In the last month I bought 3 1080 tis for $849 each. I don't really like it, but I know the card will pay for itself within the year and its 0% interest anyway... Free 1080 tis for some patience?
Back to the topic at end, i would have no problem buying used mining cards -- but i expect them to be a lot cheaper then brand new and that has not been the case. Plus my 0% interest does not work over craigslist, PM, classifieds, etc. My 5870 and 7970s mined for 18 months then became friends family gaming card and they are still working fine. My brother in laws 290x is in serious need of a thermal repaste though. I hope he gives it back to me when he upgrades
RC-Heli-3D
Limp Gawd
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In the last month I bought 3 1080 tis for $849 each. I don't really like it, but I know the card will pay for itself within the year and its 0% interest anyway... Free 1080 tis for some patience?
Back to the topic at end, i would have no problem buying used mining cards -- but i expect them to be a lot cheaper then brand new and that has not been the case. Plus my 0% interest does not work over craigslist, PM, classifieds, etc. My 5870 and 7970s mined for 18 months then became friends family gaming card and they are still working fine. My brother in laws 290x is in serious need of a thermal repaste though. I hope he gives it back to me when he upgrades
How long does it take for you to make $2400 to pay off those cards? Don't forget IRS requires taxed as well!
ya take it as a deduction, no tax, if ya make enough to qualify as a business. 160 days pay off time with current mining rates, 6 months.