China takes action against cryptocurrency mining, cryptominators ditch Radeon and RTX cards for 300 Euro

I still have a year left out of my extended 5 year warrenty for my Zotac 1080 mini, so i still have some time to see how the video card market goes, but these days i won't touch the second hand card market anymore.

 

I believe Evga does, but do most AIB's honor warranties on used cards?

 

I've never had issues with manufacturers honoring warranty of 2nd hand purchases. I bought a set of Index Controllers off ebay, got shitfaced and angy with a thot in VRChat and threw on and broke it. Valve sent me a new one. My Vive Pro headset and controllers I also bought used and sent them to Vive on the last month of a 2 yr MFR warranty.................and they sent me a brand new headset and refurbed both controllers for free.

 

It´s ironic to see China taking several actions against crypto while the US and EU are doing nothing, despite their giant propaganda about saving the planet and shoving electric cars down our throats...

So much win on this one!

 

this. brace yoursevs, tons of used GPUs without warranty and shortlife are coming to amazon and ebay.

 

The life expectancy of the card is and will not be reduced, even if it was run 24/7 for 2 years. The only thing that needs replacing (if you're unlucky) are the fans as they are physical and moving parts. The rest will out live you.

 

I call bs, especially with the 30 series vram being so hot. I wouldn't go near a 30 series card that's been used to mine for a decent time.

 

Still none has any issues with memory compared to 20 series.

 

LOL the crazy talk in this thread.

 

Neither would I. Reasons are super obvious. You'd still pay over the retail price and for a GPU that's probably about to die. I'd rather buy a new "cheap" GPU. In fact, you can buy a 6700xt for around £700 right now in the UK. Or a 3060 for around £600. I would still not touch anything 2nd hand, unless I know the person I'm buying from and I'm getting a good deal.

I would disagree. If you run a GPU for 2 years at full load, 24/7, you don't want to buy it.

 

Buying such a heavily used gpu is a gamble we know that but there is a chance card will work for many more years. There are no rules here. New card can also crap out.

 

They can keep them... you have no idea on their condition, whether they have been tampered with or what their life expectancy is. Would rather pay the 600 bucks for a new card with no risks than 300 for something that might fail the next day

 

They just going to move to other countries. Mining will be mega business, only huge farms that directly connected to power stations.
Ukraine already said they welcome mining projects since they have over electricity from the atomic power in Chernobyl.

 

I will never buy a used/worn out gpu, they can keep them,
tbh they saved me money by making it hard to get a rtx 30 series card, made me think what i really wanted, so im skipping them till the 40 series comes, maybe i will look at the 30 series refresh if there lower tdp cause the 300+ watts is off putting

 

As a hobby miner i'm telling you guys to forget about these second hand mining cards, wait for the LHR cards to arrive miners have zero interest in those.

 

New GPUs will not come down in price for a while. The pent up demand built up over the past 10 months will ensure prices remain relatively high for quite a bit longer.

 

I can't see shops charging £900+ for 3070 LHR.

 

I know it's not the same cards architecture, not sure if it plays a role in what I'll share but my GTX 1080 was second-hand when I bought it on eBay back in around November 2016 I believe. At the time it was the best 'mint condition' card I found (with the original retail box and all the packaging stuff included, everything was there). However, the seller did specify in the description that he used it extensively for cryptomining. But, back in 2016, as recent as it is, the very word 'cryptomining' was new to me and I didn't fully understand the meaning nor what it meant when someone would use a card "for that stuff".

All that mattered to me at the time was that the card was physically (and visibly, thanks to a lot of pictures provided by the seller) in good shape. So I bought it. Back then I got it for about $680 (Canadian) if I recall, and a brand new one would have been around $850 or so (I remember enough that I saved about $160 to maybe $180 or so, by going second-hand instead). The reason why I'm sharing this is because I'm basically the owner of a card that was supposedly used a lot for cryptomining, and I've owned it all this time up to right now as I type this. I've been through really hot and humid summers with this bad boy, too (we've had 2 particularly hot summers here since that time passed, with room temperatures reaching well into the 42 to 45 degrees Celcius... and that's about what... maybe 105 to 115 Fahrenheit; without air conditioning).

It's still functioning very well to this day. Then again I never over-clocked it past the default frequencies (my model is only slightly factory over-clocked, but it's not much). To note, one thing in particular I recall in the seller's item description before I bought it, was that he specified that the environment in which the card was located (or "exposed" to) was "ideal", that it was used in a 'servers room' setup with proper air conditioning, minimal dust accumulation (with proper room air flow), etc. He didn't show pictures of the room in question but I was picturing the sort of setup in my mind.

I didn't ask him about the card's life expectancy but I did ask him if he over-clocked it past the factory OC frequencies, to which he said no; and then I asked him if he would estimate how long he used it for cryptomining and he replied "just a few months straight" (without saying how much time exactly).

So yeah, I wanted to share this for a few reasons:

1) Maybe I've been simply very lucky, but despite my card being an "ex-cryptomining victim" unit, it performed admirably for over 4 years by now. Never over-heated, never was the culprit of anything in my gaming, never had any artifacting, etc.

2) With these news now, people will definitely be tempted to go for a card that was (more than likely) used for cryptomining as well.

3) If that's the case, then I HIGHLY recommend that if you ever go on a site like eBay to buy such a card, DO ask questions to the seller and DO read the description properly. If there's not enough information or if the seller isn't saying what the card was used for (outside of "gaming") then bring the questions to the seller, contact him, ask him, etc. If there's no pictures (and close ups) of the card itself and if the seller isn't providing pictures of the cards under all main angles (from the sides, from top, bottom, front and back) then DO NOT buy.

I don't know if there's any "real-world" life expectancy reduction for a card that would then be used only for gaming (after being used for cryptomining). However, I do know that most NVIDIA / AMD cards partners / manufacturers do test their cards extensively in labs. They test under all sorts of 'stress' environments and conditions (from what I've read once... not sure how accurate that actually is though). I think that graphics cards, when used with care, can be some real tough fighters and can last a very, very long time before they start failing. So what I'm saying here is that if the cryptominer at the very least used the card under "good" or ideal conditions, then chances are that it could still be a very good card to own just for gaming afterwards. BUT... of course, be 100% sure to get all the info and details on the card in question before buying if anyone of you here thinks of buying one like that in the coming weeks or months.

 

A few months straight is fine if done right, i.e. underclock card massively and be conservative on the vram oc.
These second hand mining cards from china, the chips will be like new, however the vram will be like that of a 3 - 4 year old gaming card, if they've been used for nearly a year at this point.
So chips will be great, however the vram will be very compromised and will have been OCed to max.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/oh4yqh/why_does_videocards_promo_a_fake_news_then/