Miners selling GPUs from farms - should you get one?

[Cris.py]

So, with recent drop in crypto I've already seen few panic sales. Talking a guy one town over selling like 300 different GPUs, another one had like 100 2080ti etc.

 

I remember the first crypto crash when you could buy a 1070 for under 100 eur. I don't expect same level of cheap now but prices are already dropping it seems. So this got me to a question: should one buy a mining GPU. I can imagine someone with such large farm would know how to keep them cool and safe. Can you expect any serious failures other than fans etc dying? Any info is helpful.

[Levent]

Depends on the price. Dont expect to get a second hand card and dont have to any maintenance on it. I personally dont care as long as card is not broken or displaying any sort of artifacts, I will happily replace thermal paste, pads and fans and flash its stock bios if I got the card for cheap.

[Hybris5112]

I would treat it like buying a used engine. While you have it out you might as well strip and rebuild the whole thing. That said even if you bought a used card, I would view it as a band aid ultimately and would strong suggest continuing to set aside money for a replacement should that GPU suddenly fail.

[jaslion]

Depends on the price. I remember stocking up on a pile of 480's that lasted me about a year. Also some other 900 series and other cards that ended up lasting me through this gpu problem till somewhere halfway last year for people looking for a budget option in their gaming system. You could get a butload of cards for 1000€ when that happened :p.

 

Of course it all depends on how well taken care of they were. I only bought them of people that had a lot of info, pictures that had a date of their current render farm condition and a couple test buys before going big on the load. Ended up out of the 150 ish cards I bought with 4 dead ones and 5 damaged ones of which I basically could fix all with just using spare parts of the dead ones. A fair few did need thermal paste replacements and some needed new fans but all in all not a lot of work for a lot of value.

[ewitte]

Anyone knowing what they are doing mining ran the card at a low load there shouldn't be any card issues.  Depending on the setup/miner though the fan usage may have been high.  The fan is the only thing I would worry about. 

[Middcore]

"Professional" miners who have actual multi-GPU rigs farms would typically know what they're doing and the card wouldn't have suffered any more "wear" than it would gaming for the same length of time.

 

If we're talking about little 10 year old JaxonDaGamer who is trying to mine on his single card in between rounds of Fortnite that's a different matter.

[Mick Naughty]

No different than buying any outer used card. As long as its a good card from a good manufacture, I'd buy it. 

[whm1974]

Don't. Instead make Coin Miners eat their Cost as much as possible. They are responsible for causing Brownouts around the World.