As anybody might have predicted, cryptocurrency miners need to unload their used GPUs now that it could
now not be worthwhile to mine Ethereum and different blockchain property. Before you purchase a card at a doubtlessly steep low cost, although, bear in mind that you just may not find yourself getting what you thought you had been buying.
That is true in any scenario wherein you have determined to purchase a used GPU (or
something preowned), however you need to be particularly cautious now that the
cryptocurrency market is tumbling. Whereas massive scale mining operations can afford to trip out the downturn in hopes of a restoration, informal miners and medium sized mining outfits are flooding the market with used GPUs. Plus there’s the looming swap to Ethereum 2.0, which might drastically drop the demand for GPUs amongst miners.
It is no coincidence that GPU costs proceed to fall basically—as we wrote about earlier this week, Radeon graphics playing cards have
plunged beneath MSRP in some markets, and GeForce playing cards should not far behind. This isn’t solely due to crypto, however the correlation over time (and notably extra not too long ago) is definitely arduous to disregard.
This is the place issues get difficult, although. You by no means know precisely what you are getting whenever you buy a used graphics card, and there are experiences that miners are scamming individuals by by some means masking faulty reminiscence on their GPUs.
These experiences all appear to hint again to an
Chinese language discussion board publish, wherein within the OP warns, “Do not buy a mining card,” based on a Google translation. The poster claims they purchased a used MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Suprim X for round half the retail worth, after which found that 2GB of GDDR6 reminiscence was faulty.
In regular conditions, faulty VRAM would forestall a graphics card from working. However based on the poster, the cardboard was modified to basically masks the faulty reminiscence and proceed to perform with 8GB of GDDR6 as a substitute of 10GB.
There is a Chinese language-language video at
Bilibili that purportedly
exhibits this mod, and from what we will collect, it is a matter of pulling the cardboard’s BIOS and tweaking it to disregard the reminiscence addresses for the useless RAM. Observe that we’re not 100% that that is what is going on on, that is simply what it appears like from what we will glean from the video.
One other clarification posed within the thread is that it is a faux card and/or a
GeForce RTX 3070 Ti modded to be acknowledged as a
GeForce RTX 3080. Nevertheless, the OP claims to have confirmed that it’s truly a GeForce RTX 3080 with 2GB of faulty reminiscence.
Shopping for a beforehand owned card that was used to mine crypto would not essentially imply you are getting a faulty unit or one that may’t carry out in addition to new. In lots of circumstances, the GPU is definitely working underneath spec, as a result of that is not the element that does the heavy lifting. It is principally concerning the reminiscence.
At this level, it is in all probability higher to attend for the next-gen fashions anyway, if for no different purpose than to see what impression they’ve on costs for current-gen playing cards. Should you do purchase a used card, although, you would possibly wish to give it an excellent cleansing (mud off these fan blades and vents) and reapply the thermal paste, for those who’re snug doing that.
