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stop no matter the price you should never buy a secondhand GPU that was used

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for mining it could be as much as 10

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slower for each year it's spent mining cryptocurrencies

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like ethereum or dogecoin

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at least that's what the rumor that has been spreading ever since pallet

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microsystems a large manufacturer of gpus allegedly warned benchmark.pl about

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the supposed dangers of buying used gpus but hold on a minute

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a GPU manufacturer only makes money when you buy a new GPU of course they would

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want to warn you off buying a cheaper secondhand one so is there any truth to

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this to find out we contacted an acquaintance of mine a local full-time

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crypto miner yeah i know

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i know but he's otherwise a totally cool guy

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so we got in touch with him and we borrowed three gpus that have been

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mining 24 7 365 for one

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two and three years and i'll be comparing

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their performance to our closest available equivalent gpus that have done

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pretty much nothing but sit on the shelf in our storeroom this is an important

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video because when the inevitable GPU price crash does happen it'll determine

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whether it's worth it to pull the trigger on a used GPU to finally turn

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the tables on those filthy filthy miners

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oh oh no offense but by the way thanks for lending me these cards

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and thanks to world of tanks for sponsoring this video world of tanks is

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the free to play epic online combat multiplayer game that features tanks use

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invite code tank mania at the link below to get some great bonuses

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we've actually talked about performance degradation before in this video where i

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compared a 10 year old gtx 480 that had been quite heavily used to a brand new

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inbox one and that time around our conclusion was that if it's still

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running at the same clock speed its performance will be identical to the day

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it was new however if the silicon has degraded to the point where it can't run

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at those clock speeds it's gonna artifact or black screen rather than

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somehow lose performance so why are we

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revisiting this topic i'm so glad you asked modern graphics

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cards ever since the gtx 680 no longer run at a fixed clock speed and it's

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common practice for manufacturers to advertise both a base clock speed as

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well as a boost clock speed for what they would expect the GPU to reach under

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typical conditions and this is where things get really interesting all other

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things being equal the performance of a processor like a GPU is directly

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determined by how many cycles it performs per second and with nearly a 20

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percent difference between the base and boost clocks of say NVIDIA's rtx 3080

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it's conceivable to imagine a card that still works but with dramatically worse

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performance so let's meet our cards shall we starting

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with the ASUS tough rtx 3080 10g gaming

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now we were really lucky here in that we happened to have

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in the box to give you some idea how little it's been used a tough 3080

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gaming card that is identical to the one that has been running for 10 months of

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continuous use mining cryptocurrency now that is less than a year

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but if the rumored claims from palette are to be believed it should already have

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dropped a measurable amount of performance compared to this otherwise

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identical card let's get it on the test bench

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because we're comparing like for like that is to say that both graphics cards

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in each round of our testing are using the same GPU our setup can be very

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straightforward all we're going to do is run furmark until we reach a plateau in

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temperatures then we're going to log the GPU clock speed for a period of one

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minute and take the average that'll tell us about what the card is boosting to

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one down and while our results seem fine we won't know for sure until we compare

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to a card that doesn't have a layer of dust all over the fan

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here comes GPU number two divided by 1950 equals

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oh well our mining 3080 did end up slower but it

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turns out it was only by point eight percent so

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that is well within the margin of difference that you might expect just

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picking up two brand new thirty eighties off the shelf and running them against

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each other but that doesn't prove degradation isn't real let's move on to

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something that's been running for quite a bit longer representing our

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approximately two years is this rtx 2070

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gaming z8 gig from MSI it's actually

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only been mining for about 18 months but

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in theory if it's supposed to lose 10 performance per year this one should be

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quite a bit slower than an unused card okay i had planned to show you guys the

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results for the 2070s after i had run both cards but this first one is so

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interesting that i couldn't wait in spite of it being rated only for a boost

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clock of 1830 megahertz this MSI card is still running at well

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over 1900 in fermark definitely interesting even

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if i'm not sure how valid this data point will be because while we did

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manage to get perfectly matching cards for our 3080 test for our 2070 we were

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not quite as lucky i mean we'd have loved to just buy a perfect match for

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the one that was given to us by the miner but the problem with that is that most used

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gpus on the market are so called because

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well they've been used and the whole point of our test is that we want to

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compare to something that is in like new conditions so even if we found a GPU

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that someone said hadn't been touched we'd be just relying on their word as

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opposed to any kind of empirical data

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so what we decided to do was go with a non-matching GPU that we know has spent

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most of its life on a shelf even though it is rated for a lower boost clock if

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anything then this should make it even easier for our mining card to maintain

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its performance edge and this card also ran well above its

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rated boost clock so i guess what that means is that our test

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doesn't tell us really anything about performance degradation due to mining

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but rather that NVIDIA's sophisticated GPU boost technology has never really

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cared much about what the rated clock speed from the board partner is so

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both cards are behaving as they should and even their relative performance

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given that they're both rated for about 100 megahertz difference in boost

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is exactly what we would expect if they were brand new of course

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that doesn't mean that it's bs because we still have one more test a

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gtx 1060 that has been mining for four

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years okay i was way off in the intro

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for this generation both of our cards are rated for the same clock speeds but

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with different cooler designs though both of them should help them reach

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pretty much the full potential of the silicon this a non-tech review from 2016

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shows a founder's card like this one performing within about five percent of

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an ASUS strix card that has a beefier cooler so if mining for four years did

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anything to our zotac card's performance

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it should be pretty evident in the

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results let's take them down we're looking at an average of 18.35

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and

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conclusion 1847 versus 1830

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basically the same so okay then using a GPU still doesn't

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appreciably affect the day-to-day performance of said GPU that is unless

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pallet is admitting that their cards die really quickly or something i don't know

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probably not so it's purely binary then it still works or it doesn't work

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anymore go ahead and buy mining cards end of story right

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well not quite it's clear from their condition that

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while these gpus might have been heavily used for mining they've also either been

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very regularly cleaned or kept in a basically dust free environment and

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because modern gpus boost higher in some cases much higher when they run at lower

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temperatures the condition of the cooler is critical to the performance of the

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graphics card so a broken or clogged up

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or otherwise hobbled heatsink could easily cause a 10 performance hit or

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more that's why it is so important to carefully inspect the condition of the

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cooler of a graphics card before you make a purchase they can be a real

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nightmare to track down second hand if you need to replace them and depending

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on how much you're spending the remaining lifespan of the GPU before it

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reaches that binary doesn't work state could be a major concern as well i mean

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if you're paying half the price for the same performance brand new

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i say yolo it and buy another one if it dies but if you're only saving a few bucks

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well i'd recommend this video about why

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electronics die where luke explains how even components with

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no moving parts can be gradually worn out by invisible forces like thermal

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expansion and contraction and even the physical flow of electron through the

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tiny copper wires in a microprocessor with that said a quality GPU would have

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been built to last much longer than its warranty period and in my opinion the

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flood of used gpus that is undoubtedly coming could be the tide change the pc

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gaming community has been waiting for so the bottom line

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know the risks but don't let anyone scare you off of a good deal with

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baseless fud and don't let me scare you off our

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for 10 battles each if you guys enjoyed this video you might enjoy our uh

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turning a mining GPU into a gaming GPU where we had that headless card we

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managed to get it running that one was pretty cool