stop no matter the price you should never buy a secondhand GPU that was used
for mining it could be as much as 10
slower for each year it's spent mining cryptocurrencies
like ethereum or dogecoin
at least that's what the rumor that has been spreading ever since pallet
microsystems a large manufacturer of gpus allegedly warned benchmark.pl about
the supposed dangers of buying used gpus but hold on a minute
a GPU manufacturer only makes money when you buy a new GPU of course they would
want to warn you off buying a cheaper secondhand one so is there any truth to
this to find out we contacted an acquaintance of mine a local full-time
crypto miner yeah i know
i know but he's otherwise a totally cool guy
so we got in touch with him and we borrowed three gpus that have been
mining 24 7 365 for one
two and three years and i'll be comparing
their performance to our closest available equivalent gpus that have done
pretty much nothing but sit on the shelf in our storeroom this is an important
video because when the inevitable GPU price crash does happen it'll determine
whether it's worth it to pull the trigger on a used GPU to finally turn
the tables on those filthy filthy miners
oh oh no offense but by the way thanks for lending me these cards
and thanks to world of tanks for sponsoring this video world of tanks is
the free to play epic online combat multiplayer game that features tanks use
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we've actually talked about performance degradation before in this video where i
compared a 10 year old gtx 480 that had been quite heavily used to a brand new
inbox one and that time around our conclusion was that if it's still
running at the same clock speed its performance will be identical to the day
it was new however if the silicon has degraded to the point where it can't run
at those clock speeds it's gonna artifact or black screen rather than
somehow lose performance so why are we
revisiting this topic i'm so glad you asked modern graphics
cards ever since the gtx 680 no longer run at a fixed clock speed and it's
common practice for manufacturers to advertise both a base clock speed as
well as a boost clock speed for what they would expect the GPU to reach under
typical conditions and this is where things get really interesting all other
things being equal the performance of a processor like a GPU is directly
determined by how many cycles it performs per second and with nearly a 20
percent difference between the base and boost clocks of say NVIDIA's rtx 3080
it's conceivable to imagine a card that still works but with dramatically worse
performance so let's meet our cards shall we starting
with the ASUS tough rtx 3080 10g gaming
now we were really lucky here in that we happened to have
in the box to give you some idea how little it's been used a tough 3080
gaming card that is identical to the one that has been running for 10 months of
continuous use mining cryptocurrency now that is less than a year
but if the rumored claims from palette are to be believed it should already have
dropped a measurable amount of performance compared to this otherwise
identical card let's get it on the test bench
because we're comparing like for like that is to say that both graphics cards
in each round of our testing are using the same GPU our setup can be very
straightforward all we're going to do is run furmark until we reach a plateau in
temperatures then we're going to log the GPU clock speed for a period of one
minute and take the average that'll tell us about what the card is boosting to
one down and while our results seem fine we won't know for sure until we compare
to a card that doesn't have a layer of dust all over the fan
here comes GPU number two divided by 1950 equals
oh well our mining 3080 did end up slower but it
turns out it was only by point eight percent so
that is well within the margin of difference that you might expect just
picking up two brand new thirty eighties off the shelf and running them against
each other but that doesn't prove degradation isn't real let's move on to
something that's been running for quite a bit longer representing our
approximately two years is this rtx 2070
gaming z8 gig from MSI it's actually
only been mining for about 18 months but
in theory if it's supposed to lose 10 performance per year this one should be
quite a bit slower than an unused card okay i had planned to show you guys the
results for the 2070s after i had run both cards but this first one is so
interesting that i couldn't wait in spite of it being rated only for a boost
clock of 1830 megahertz this MSI card is still running at well
over 1900 in fermark definitely interesting even
if i'm not sure how valid this data point will be because while we did
manage to get perfectly matching cards for our 3080 test for our 2070 we were
not quite as lucky i mean we'd have loved to just buy a perfect match for
the one that was given to us by the miner but the problem with that is that most used
gpus on the market are so called because
well they've been used and the whole point of our test is that we want to
compare to something that is in like new conditions so even if we found a GPU
that someone said hadn't been touched we'd be just relying on their word as
opposed to any kind of empirical data
so what we decided to do was go with a non-matching GPU that we know has spent
most of its life on a shelf even though it is rated for a lower boost clock if
anything then this should make it even easier for our mining card to maintain
its performance edge and this card also ran well above its
rated boost clock so i guess what that means is that our test
doesn't tell us really anything about performance degradation due to mining
but rather that NVIDIA's sophisticated GPU boost technology has never really
cared much about what the rated clock speed from the board partner is so
both cards are behaving as they should and even their relative performance
given that they're both rated for about 100 megahertz difference in boost
is exactly what we would expect if they were brand new of course
that doesn't mean that it's bs because we still have one more test a
gtx 1060 that has been mining for four
years okay i was way off in the intro
for this generation both of our cards are rated for the same clock speeds but
with different cooler designs though both of them should help them reach
pretty much the full potential of the silicon this a non-tech review from 2016
shows a founder's card like this one performing within about five percent of
an ASUS strix card that has a beefier cooler so if mining for four years did
anything to our zotac card's performance
it should be pretty evident in the
results let's take them down we're looking at an average of 18.35
and
conclusion 1847 versus 1830
basically the same so okay then using a GPU still doesn't
appreciably affect the day-to-day performance of said GPU that is unless
pallet is admitting that their cards die really quickly or something i don't know
probably not so it's purely binary then it still works or it doesn't work
anymore go ahead and buy mining cards end of story right
well not quite it's clear from their condition that
while these gpus might have been heavily used for mining they've also either been
very regularly cleaned or kept in a basically dust free environment and
because modern gpus boost higher in some cases much higher when they run at lower
temperatures the condition of the cooler is critical to the performance of the
graphics card so a broken or clogged up
or otherwise hobbled heatsink could easily cause a 10 performance hit or
more that's why it is so important to carefully inspect the condition of the
cooler of a graphics card before you make a purchase they can be a real
nightmare to track down second hand if you need to replace them and depending
on how much you're spending the remaining lifespan of the GPU before it
reaches that binary doesn't work state could be a major concern as well i mean
if you're paying half the price for the same performance brand new
i say yolo it and buy another one if it dies but if you're only saving a few bucks
well i'd recommend this video about why
electronics die where luke explains how even components with
no moving parts can be gradually worn out by invisible forces like thermal
expansion and contraction and even the physical flow of electron through the
tiny copper wires in a microprocessor with that said a quality GPU would have
been built to last much longer than its warranty period and in my opinion the
flood of used gpus that is undoubtedly coming could be the tide change the pc
gaming community has been waiting for so the bottom line
know the risks but don't let anyone scare you off of a good deal with
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
turning a mining GPU into a gaming GPU where we had that headless card we
managed to get it running that one was pretty cool