Will mining damage my GPU?

the_onlooker · May 9, 2022

Hello Everyone!

I recently got a OC RTX 3070 Ti (new) and was wondering if I mined, would it damage it?

Thanks!

Grimet

Mozra · May 9, 2022

No id doesn't but ltt has made a video on it

Lightwreather · May 9, 2022

No.

As long as you don't leave it in a dusty corner.

manikyath · May 9, 2022

mining on a card doesnt 'damage' it any more or less than gaming on a card. as long as you have a cooling setup that'll keep it reasonable during 24/7 operations there's little that can go wrong.

Somerandomtechyboi · May 9, 2022

Degrade would be the more accurate term

Maybe at a very very slightly accelerated rate if you do 24/7 but the degradation wont be noticable for the next 10 years or so of running 24/7 since mining also involves undervolting the gpu core due to vram being more important for mining

YoungBlade · May 9, 2022

If you are going to mine, for most coins, you want to underclock the core and overclock the VRAM. With my RTX 2060 Super, when I was mining, I'd run it at around 980-1060MHz on the core and 7600-8000MHz on the memory. You should be able to get the vast majority of the mining performance (90-95%) at a way lower power consumption. This helps, as the GPU itself produces most of the heat, so you can run the fans at a lower speed and still get decent cooling. But make sure not to run the fans at too low of a speed, or else the memory might overheat. Honestly, the fans are likely to be the first part to die on the card, regardless of whether you are mining or gaming, so being able to run them at a lower speed is a good thing.

All that said, if you're planing to mine ETH, you've kinda missed the boat on that one. The profitability has really tanked in the last few months, and with summer coming for the northern hemisphere, I don't think it's worth it to mine anymore, as you're working against your AC and thus increasing your electricity cost even higher - 100W of mining is going to output 100W of heat, which your AC unit is going to have to deal with.

Make sure you do the calculations based on your electricity costs to make sure you aren't actually losing money while mining. Also, you need to remember that the 3070 Ti is an LHR card, so your profitability is even lower than the speed of the card would suggest.