With the oppression of cryptocurrency in China, we've heard that GPUs previously used in mining setups are being sold secondhand, but for those who are tempted to do what may seem like a cheapie, or at least a product at a discount. reasonable cost, a graph. The card manufacturer tried to clarify the risks of deleting an old mining card. Palit chatted with Polish tech site Benchmark.pl (as reported by Computer Gamer) and notes that based on independent tests of graphics cards used for crypto mining, expect a XNUMX% drop in performance from the GPU. For all years, the card was used for mining twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week (so almost nine thousand hours of non-stop use equates to a drop of ten%). Of course, that makes a few assumptions, but that's an average expectation of the performance baggage an older graphics card might carry. Of course, there's no way to know how well the miner might have handled a particularly resold GPU, and as Computer Gamer points out, some people are more cautious than others, and may not even have stolen the card for better efficiency. , and I took care of it a bit. However, it's more than likely that the graphics cards involved in mining operations have been abused, pushed hard XNUMX/XNUMX, and heated up in poorly ventilated environments, so it's not very They're probably in great condition, as Palit points out. Another downside is that miners realize that when people see that a card is an old mining card, they're going to be more suspicious and less likely to buy, so the obvious thing to do is to deceive and not accept that the GPU was one of them. the ones that worked. in the heat of the mines. They will simply pretend they are almost new cards, or even repackage them to make them look like brand new products. So, as we've already explained, with the influx of second-hand mining GPUs, you have to be very careful about the second-hand market for graphics cards. In particular, watch out for suspicious things like a card on sale that has had its stock cooler replaced (which you usually won't see).
Analysis: clear and present risk
Of course, Palit has a bit of an edge here to convince people that they should buy new GPUs instead of running GPUs, since that's their business. But the risks inherent in picking up a graphics card of this class are something we warned about above, as mentioned previously, and there are clear dangers involved. Buying a used GPU is a minefield (ahem) all the time, but with major mining operations shutting down, if they need to move the cards in use, it's obviously in their best interest to do so before the market corrects further. . (While very high prices and inventory issues are always a thorn in buyers' side, a reality that seems to be changing, slowly more likely). So for now, it's worth making sure that buyers of used graphics cards, or more particularly so-called new GPUs like eBay and StockX, need to be more careful who they buy from than ever before. Of course, the oppression of cryptocurrency mining is also good news in terms of falling costs of new GPUs, with the crypto side of the demand equation falling. All of this is to say that unless you're really, really overwhelmed, playing a waiting game now, rather than skipping out on buying a graphics card, is probably the smarter move. The best graphics card deals right now
