Buying cards used for Mining.

[Rolph]

Hello guys!
So I am planning to build a new PC, one of my friends offered me one of his 1070 Ti cards he used on his mining rig. The card has only been used for around a year, and the temperature of them was never higher than ~60 C so it wasn't frying or been abused, that being said it was still used for a prolonged period of time without being turned off. Does anyone here have any experience with hardware like this and have any tips about this? Is it safe to buy?

Thank you for any feedback!

[dnakruf]

12 minutes ago, Rolph said:

Hello guys!
So I am planning to build a new PC, one of my friends offered me one of his 1070 Ti cards he used on his mining rig. The card has only been used for around a year, and the temperature of them was never higher than ~60 C so it wasn't frying or been abused, that being said it was still used for a prolonged period of time without being turned off. Does anyone here have any experience with hardware like this and have any tips about this? Is it safe to buy?

Thank you for any feedback!

Hello I have used 2 RX 580s that were used for mining and here are the tips I could give you from my experience:

 

Does it have a warranty?

How clean is it, is it dusty and is the backplate somewhat oily or greasy?

Did you see it work? If you can stresstest the GPU, please do so and see how stable is the test and the temperatures.

 

-If the temperatures are not stable it might either be because the thermal paste is dried up or the fans are not healthy anymore.

 

Try light and heavy gaming before you buy it and supervise the temperatures; at what degree do the fans start to spin?

And lastly, does the gpu have a custom bios installed?

 

Answer these questions and see how well the card does, if the answers are OK the card is quite usable from my experience ^^

[Rolph]

6 minutes ago, dnakruf said:

Does it have a warranty?

How clean is it, is it dusty and is the backplate somewhat oily or greasy?

 Did you see it work? If you can stresstest the GPU, please do so and see how stable is the test and the temperatures.

 

-If the temperatures are not stable it might either be because the thermal paste is dried up or the fans are not healthy anymore.

  

Try light and heavy gaming before you buy it and supervise the temperatures; at what degree do the fans start to spin?

And lastly, does the gpu have a custom bios installed?

 

As far as I know it does have a warranty, but not sure if he still has the box for it, not sure if it can be returned without it or changed if it fails.
It is clean, the rig was mainly used in his home, we actually set them up together.
I have seen it mining, haven't seen it actually used for gaming or anything besides mining.

What software do you suggest using for stress testing? Or do you mean just run some games on it?

[dnakruf]

1 minute ago, Rolph said:

As far as I know it does have a warranty, but not sure if he still has the box for it, not sure if it can be returned without it or changed if it fails.
It is clean, the rig was mainly used in his home, we actually set them up together.
I have seen it mining, haven't seen it actually used for gaming or anything besides mining.

What software do you suggest using for stress testing? Or do you mean just run some games on it?

I suggest you try stresstests like Furmark and also some Triple A title games. Try to see both synthetic and real-life performance of the card.

What brand is the card ?

[Rolph]

3 minutes ago, dnakruf said:

I suggest you try stresstests like Furmark and also some Triple A title games. Try to see both synthetic and real-life performance of the card.

What brand is the card ?

Asus rog strix 1070 ti.
Currently using msi geforce 960 and some old cpu want an upgrade at last lol.

[dnakruf]

3 minutes ago, Rolph said:

Asus rog strix 1070 ti.
Currently using msi geforce 960 and some old cpu want an upgrade at last lol.

I have never dealt with ASUS customer support or RMA so if something ever happens to the card I do not know to what extend ASUS would be of help.

 

As stated before, if you can take the card for a test run for a day. I assume that won't be a problem since the owner of the card is your friend.

 

A GPU is a GPU, if it isn't wrecked it can run games without any problems is what I would say drawing conclusions from my exp ^^

[Mick Naughty]

Just test it. Use is use overall. As long as it isn’t a crappy card like msi with their horrid cooler design. You will be fine. My cards mined for over a year. Never had an issue, don’t see it happening either. Tend to by nvidia or reference evga with actual build quality. 

[Rolph]

12 minutes ago, Mick Naughty said:

Just test it. Use is use overall. As long as it isn’t a crappy card like msi with their horrid cooler design. You will be fine. My cards mined for over a year. Never had an issue, don’t see it happening either. Tend to by nvidia or reference evga with actual build quality. 

Yeah, I was thinking the same, someone said to me when we talked about this that the electronic parts do not wear out like lets say mechanical parts as there isn't actually much to wear from usage, if the part was not abused like 100C constant temps there shouldn't be any issues I guess. Just wanted to check with people who actually have experience with this hardware.

[Mick Naughty]

5 minutes ago, Rolph said:

Yeah, I was thinking the same, someone said to me when we talked about this that the electronic parts do not wear out like lets say mechanical parts as there isn't actually much to wear from usage, if the part was not abused like 100C constant temps there shouldn't be any issues I guess. Just wanted to check with people who actually have experience with this hardware.

Well there are more posts about people’s cards failing from user error or poor quality. Mining doesn’t exploit any issues that gaming doesn’t. Gaming is more stressful anyway but the people who think they know what they are talking about say otherwise. No one mines at 100c, they tend not to be like gamers.