new gpus are expensive oh ah oh my money
bone but the media says that buying a secondhand GPU is risky oh it's a bad
idea well as a ruthless deal hunter I disagree and to prove my point I bought
19 used gpus to run through our Gauntlet
of over 1500 tests settling this
argument once and for all every one of
these gpus was sourced anonymously from 17 different sellers on eBay and we
looked at everything from clock speeds to Performance to thermals we did run
into some pitfalls but with our help there's no reason for you to be afraid
so when the time comes to adopt your rescue GPU you should be able to
recognize and maybe even overcome any
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link in the video description it's always the video description when we
bought these cards last year we took a shotgun approach trying to get a mixture
of different brands at a variety of price points the only requirement was
that at some point they had to have been desirable for Mining and hard to find
for gamers so we ended up with some Radeon 5700 series carts these were
super power efficient and lower demand compared to the NVIDIA competition
making them some of the most profitable cards for mining on the green side of
things 30 60s were popular thanks to their High vram to price ratio and not
to mention the failure of NVIDIA's foolish attempt to limit hash rates and
as for 30 70s and 3080s well they were
just plain powerful now whenever you're buying used step one is to talk to the
seller as much as people like to paint crypto miners as
monsters and some of them are the majority of used GPU sellers are just
regular people who saw a way to make some extra cash and would happily tell
you about the card's history step two then is to inspect the product for
obvious issues physical damage wear and tear scratches or in the case of a GPU
any loose components be they fans or
capacitors I'd recommend at this stage giving the GPU a good shake for real
then you want to investigate the source of any of the noises that you
hear now for obvious reasons it would be best to do this before handing over your
money like if you were to meet up in person through Facebook Marketplace but
eBay buyer protection is really good these days meaning that you can do it
after the fact if you use a good Marketplace just make sure to report any
issues with the condition of the product before the time limit runs out now most
of our cards arrived looking pretty good other than maybe needing a quick blast
of compressed air which seems to support the theory that I've seen many times
that miners actually are financially incentivized to take good care of their
cards in hopes of maximizing their lifespans however we also got a couple
that were in questionable condition and that how do I put this
um kind of smelled it has kind of a vinegar smell to it and then there's
that MSI 5700 XT with the rattle to it but that otherwise looks good of course
looks is only enough if you're planning to use your new gpus as bookends we want
to know how they perform the best way to determine if their performance has been
affected by their time in the mines would be to measure these gpus against
identical brand new ones unfortunately however these are older cards and mint
condition ones don't really exist so the
control lines that you see on our charts are going to be from lightly used gpus
from our stock that have spent most of their lives on the Shelf it's worth
noting here by the way that we expect some degree of variation between these
cards and the goal here is not to find the winner but rather to see if our used
gpus are performing within spec a quick
and dirty way to check this is MSI combustor it takes just a couple of
minutes so it's the kind of thing that you could ask a seller to run before you
hand over your money if your GPU is significantly degraded its clock speeds
may fail to reach a normal level and right out of the gate it's obvious that
some of our samples do have some problems the maximum and average clock
speeds of our 3080s and our 3070s check
out nicely with some variants but nothing that would indicate an issue
meanwhile our 3060 results show us our
first obvious problematic GPU the eagle
OC its average clocks are far are lower
than they should be we're going to put a pin in that for now though and move on to the 5700 Series where we see some
very odd behavior as well we want to keep a particularly close eye on the
performance of this Sapphire pulse card now there are a few factors that
determine the Boost clock speed of a card the main ones are the type of work
the card is performing the quality of the silicon and the quality of the
cooler now we've standardized our workload for now combustor and there's
no way for us to affect silicon quality so the first troubleshooting step for
any underperforming card is to take its temperature maybe it's got a wee little
fever and there it is the eagle OC 3060
that we flagged before is thermally throttling with temps that far exceed
any of our other 30 60s if we wanted to fix it getting those temps under control
would be a very good start but this is a
second hand buyer's guide not a GPU repair guide so what you need to do is
return that thing and let the seller figure it out now now let's turn our
attention to the 5700 xt's that Sapphire pulse that had the lower clocks seems to
have its thermals well in check so throttling is unlikely it also doesn't
have clock speeds that are substantially limited which seems to rule out the
possibility that our seller was using a modified BIOS optimized for mining stuff
like this is why combustor can only be considered a quick and dirty tool so for
this one we are going to need to go a little bit deeper and look at the
amazing new underwear on ltdstore.com oh
and also at some real world games we settled on six games at three
resolutions and at risk of spoiling the conclusion a little bit here the vast
majority of our results were neck and neck with our control cards now the lab
hasn't defined specific values yet for what counts as equal but we figure for
the purposes of this video 58 60fps
that's going to be an imperceptible difference so as long as our mining gpus
managed to be 97 10 percent or higher
than the Control Card we're calling them in Spec starting with the 3080s
interestingly enough once we averaged out our results we noticed that we had a
problem with our control GPU while its
average frame rates were fine we found that its lows were lower than our mining
gpus which is going to manifest as stuttering and choppy animations during
demanding sections of the game kind of funny that the lightly used card ended
up being the borked one here we'll talk a little bit more about that later for
now the similarities between our mining cards are still enough for us to
demonstrate that they at least are fine or in the case of our EVGA model a bit
more than fine I miss you already EVGA for the 3070s we see every card
performing as expected with little to no variance across our samples and we've
got similar results with the 3060s except for the ventis 2x which landed a
little below our expectations thankfully it looks like this one was pretty easy
to explain and rectify our event is targets clock speeds that are about
three percent lower than our reference card and when lightly overclocked it
easily comes back in line now it is possible that the reason for this lower
Target clock speed is that the Silicon is slightly degraded but it's more
likely that this particular card just wasn't as good from the start I'm going
to give it a pass as for the 5700 XTS our Sapphire pulse ended up performing
just fine in real world applications what a relief but wait some of you are
screaming we know the cores are fine what about the vram Linus you need to
test the vram so we did we used Ida 64's
GP GPU Benchmark to see if the modules have lost any performance or started
throwing errors and every single card looks good except the eagle OC rest in
peace get your money back for this one uh unless you can't for some reason in
that case can we save the eagle OC sadly
no there are some things that can be
overcome a bad fan can be replaced a bad
Tim can be replaced hey and if a mining
BIOS has been flashed for example the folks over at Tech PowerUp have an
amazing database of GPU bioses that you can simply use to flash a stock one back
onto your card but a bing bada boom but if you encounter artifacting which looks
a little something like this or outright errors like we just saw the cold hard
truth is that you probably cannot do anything which means then that there is
some truth to the warnings you've seen about used cards whether it's
intentional or not there are people out there trying to sell broken gpus as
working ones but I still disagree with a lot of the points made by my fellow
members of the media let's work through them together first the idea that you
will suffer some kind of performance shortfall from the heavy use of mining
was always silly and betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of how
these products even work in some ways the heating and then cooling Cycles not
to mention the higher clock speeds that are typical in gaming workloads are more
damaging to a GPU so a heavily mined on
GPU could fail but then so could a
lightly gamed on one and until either of them does it will work as well as the
other and now that you're armed with the tools that you need to weed out the bad
from the good gpus follow a very similar failure
pattern to other electronics meaning that the lemons usually die within weeks
or months of manufacture within their warranty period and those non-lemons
tend to live long and happy lives until they really really don't the next
misconception that I've seen thrown around is that not purchasing used cards
is somehow like like sticking it to crypto Miners And while I fully support
withholding demand until prices fall to acceptable levels a stubborn refusal to
buy one at all can only lead to two possible outcomes either someone else
will buy them or they will be scrapped as E-Waste to avoid storing them I mean
I get the anger but by not purchasing a
used GPU you're not only depriving yourself of something that you want
you're potentially encouraging more harm to the environment from my point of view
every non-obsolete GPU that is not in a
gaming PC is a brand new GPU that needs
to be manufactured in its place and if you think think about it buying new are
you really morally Superior your purchase encourages large money grubbing
corporations to keep producing more gpus out of our dwindling Rare Earth minerals
and these are the same big corporations that happily drop shipped literal tons
of gpus to large-scale mining facilities reaping record high profits during the
pandemic but like Calpers right NVIDIA
and AMD were the biggest scalpers of all leaving us at the point then where the
only moral thing to do is to simply not purchase a GPU at all
but come on what are we gonna do not play Modern Warfare 2 so the right thing
to do would be to purchase a used GPU then I mean only you can say I've long
grappled with my effect on increasing consumerism and how my very existence
encourages some of the worst aspects of capitalism but in my defense I've also
always been an outspoken advocate of keeping older hardware and service
rather than buying things that you don't need maybe it's because I believe in the
importance of the first two r's you know the reviews and reduce ones or maybe
it's because I'm just a cheapskate maybe it's that I'm lucky enough to be able to
afford to gamble on used products but in
the grand scheme of things even if they do fail every once in a while I don't
see how you can afford not to buy used I mean considering that we weren't being
particularly Savvy with our purchases we didn't haggle we didn't bid on auctions
we just bought whatever was available for asking price and then compared it to
buying new at the time and we still saved about 22 percent that is not too
shabby even if you removed the price of our broken GPU from that calculation our
savings are still 18 and a half percent compared to if we bought this stuff new
again we could have saved more money with patients than Hagley but as for
whether it makes sense for you it's going to depend on your risk tolerance
but like come on everything's a risk except buying a GPU with a transferable
warranty by the way ebta and anyway I'll tell you this much
as someone who's been Hands-On with more computer hardware than most people will
ever even lay eyes on I've seen brand new stuff die for no reason just as
often as I've seen second hand pieces of crap survive a brutal drop life is a
crap shoot and then you die just like I killed the original Segway
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