Crypto Miners Paint GDDR Memory Chips to Hide Wear and Tear

[Godlygamer23]

Summary

Crypto card miners are attempting to hide the fact that they used these cards for mining by replacing the stock cooler with one from a third party, or resoldering failed GPUs. Additionally, any memory chips that have shown signs of abuse(yellowing is noted in the article) are painted over to give the appearance of things looking normal. 

 

Quotes

Quote

As these reports note, miners are removing the stock cooling systems from GPUs to install a third-party solution or recently tried to resolder failed GPU dies back in place and paint the yellowish GDDR memory chips.

 

Images of abused GPUs and memory chips

Spoiler

Spoiler

My thoughts

Obviously, this has huge implications for the third party marketplaces that exist, such as Facebook and eBay. Because sellers like this are so willing to deceive people, it almost becomes a requirement that the tamper stickers be left untouched. Even then, it's not a given that the card has not been opened, depending on how careful the seller is with them, and how fragile they really are. Sellers may be required to provide plenty of photos of the card itself, including all of the components at various angles to try to show the card has not been tampered with. 

 

Sources

 https://www.techpowerup.com/304045/crypto-miners-paint-gddr-memory-chips-to-hide-wear-and-tear

Edited January 26, 2023 by Godlygamer23
Minor correction.

[TetraSky]

More reasons why buying a used GPU a worrying these days due to all the miners flooding the market with abused cards.

Though bitcoin has gone back up to August 2022's price, so I'm surprised any of them are still selling. Would've figured they'd be back to mining. Surely the other crypto trash are up too, no?

[Alex Atkin UK]

I was looking at a 3080 blower card for an ITX machine that doesn't have sufficient airflow to keep the CPU cool and I didn't buy the used one I found for this very reason.  I figured its likely an ex-mining card.

[Godlygamer23]

24 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I was looking at a 3080 blower card for an ITX machine that doesn't have sufficient airflow to keep the CPU cool and I didn't buy the used one I found for this very reason.  I figured its likely an ex-mining card.

I work in the military industry, and counterfeit parts are a huge concern. Counterfeit part suppliers will do wild things to make things look like a legit part, including painting, remarking, etc. 

 

These graphics cards are akin to counterfeit material. Even though they're not using fake parts, they are being portrayed as something they're not. 

[Zodiark1593]

Certainly not providing further incentive for lower video card pricing. 

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, Godlygamer23 said:

I work in the military industry, and counterfeit parts are a huge concern. Counterfeit part suppliers will do wild things to make things look like a legit part, including painting, remarking, etc. 

 

These graphics cards are akin to counterfeit material. Even though they're not using fake parts, they are being portrayed as something they're not. 

The term is "re-marked", and yes, it counts as counterfeit. At least for the last decade, a tool like CPU-Z told you what it was really.

 

But late Pentium MMX and the entire Slot-1 Pentium II/Pentium III era had a lot of remarking going on. Before clock multipliers got locked down.

 

Now as for how to prevent buying garbage on eBay, you pretty much need to avoid GPU's at "too good to be true" prices, because I guarantee those are re-marked. Ask to get the serial number and look it up on the manufacturer's site to see if it has warranty on it. No warranty, no buy.

 

 

[jagdtigger]

6 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Surely the other crypto trash are up too, no?

Doesnt matter when energy prices skyrocket.....

[Godlygamer23]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

The term is "re-marked", and yes, it counts as counterfeit. At least for the last decade, a tool like CPU-Z told you what it was really.

 

But late Pentium MMX and the entire Slot-1 Pentium II/Pentium III era had a lot of remarking going on. Before clock multipliers got locked down.

 

Now as for how to prevent buying garbage on eBay, you pretty much need to avoid GPU's at "too good to be true" prices, because I guarantee those are re-marked. Ask to get the serial number and look it up on the manufacturer's site to see if it has warranty on it. No warranty, no buy.

Counterfeit material goes beyond just the GPU and memory. GPU-Z, CPU-Z, etc won't tell you the other components on the PCB, such as the capacitors, resistors, etc, which can all be counterfeit, and depending on how far the seller goes, they might be willing to replace certain parts, and they decided to use counterfeit parts deliberately, or they just went down the cheap route, and ended up with counterfeit parts. 

Edited January 26, 2023 by Godlygamer23

[mr moose]

54 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Counterfeit material goes beyond just the GPU and memory. GPU-Z, CPU-Z, etc won't tell you the other components on the PCB, such as the capacitors, resistors, etc, which can all be counterfeit, and depending on how far the seller goes, they might be willing to replace certain parts, and they decided to use counterfeit parts deliberately, or they just down the cheap route, and ended up with counterfeit parts. 

This is why I do not buy Electronic parts of ebay, I will use only two outlets, Jaycar if I need to go into a shop and Element14 for ordering online.    The last thing I want is to find out some of my parts are re-badged cheap shit.

[Levent]

I am not sure if this is applicable to just mining. Even thermal pads can influence the surface color of VRAM chips. Cards that dont have thermal interfaces between VRAM and heatsink are also susceptible to corrosion on GDDR modules due to dust and overall airflow.

[Spotty]

... Why? Why go through the effort?

Most people aren't going to check their memory chips or GPU dies, so why go through the effort? For the 1 in 10,000 customer who does check and complain that their memory chips look faded just refund them (or more likely just tell them to take a walk since used goods are sold as is). 

I've never seen anybody complaining about a failing graphics card and associate it with discolouration on the GPU package or memory chips.

Seems like a lot of extra effort to sell a graphics card when they could just as easily sell them as is and most people won't notice or care. 

[Likwid]

I dunno, in recent GN video Kingpin mentioned that resoldering GPU die for two or three times is not really a problem and they did world record with one that was resoldered 4 times

[Isuck Assimov]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Now as for how to prevent buying garbage on eBay, you pretty much need to avoid GPU's at "too good to be true" prices, because I guarantee those are re-marked.

It's rare but sometimes sellers just want to get rid of old components for reasonable prices without scalping or they undererstimate what people are ready to pay for cards.

At the start of the pandemic i was able to get both a 1080 Ti and a RTX 2070 Super for around 200€ less than the average price for a used version of those and they were in flawless (used) condition and never gave me trouble.
 

I wouldnt buy from a miner though, that's an immediate red flag for used components.

[Doobeedoo]

Just one of the reasons I don't buy used.

[Heliian]

12 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Though bitcoin has gone back up to August 2022's price, so I'm surprised any of them are still selling. Would've figured they'd be back to mining. Surely the other crypto trash are up too, no

No. Crypto is dead, it's in its final death throes.  It doesn't matter what the price is, it's not being adopted by anyone.  Its self flagellating and btc isn't even viable on a GPU. 

 

That is why there are literal tons of e-waste gpus being dumped.  So many miners used the sale of the crap after as part of their business model.

[Godlygamer23]

5 hours ago, Spotty said:

... Why? Why go through the effort?

Most people aren't going to check their memory chips or GPU dies, so why go through the effort? For the 1 in 10,000 customer who does check and complain that their memory chips look faded just refund them (or more likely just tell them to take a walk since used goods are sold as is). 

I've never seen anybody complaining about a failing graphics card and associate it with discolouration on the GPU package or memory chips.

Seems like a lot of extra effort to sell a graphics card when they could just as easily sell them as is and most people won't notice or care. 

My guess is that it's to prevent the people that do take it apart, maybe to replace thermal paste and thermal pads, from questioning the condition of the parts soldered to the board. 

 

Ironically, the news of this happening may make selling a used card much more difficult due to higher skepticism about what people are actually buying, so the rate of people taking it apart and inspecting it when it arrives may also go up to verify the condition of the components. 

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

I mean... It's crypto miners we are talking about. They are in for the money. it's par for the course that they try to sell their spent hardware as new to maximize their ROI. Tough, it's not much different from car owner rolling back the odometer before selling their car.

1 hour ago, Heliian said:

No. Crypto is dead, it's in its final death throes.  It doesn't matter what the price is, it's not being adopted by anyone.

I'd hope so. So many retails have gotten wiped out. The only way for retail to be made whole is for an even bigger waves of even greater fools to come in and serve as exit liquidity. Hopefully the pain and fear of being defrauded, and imminent regulation, will prevent that from happening.

 

1 hour ago, Heliian said:

Its self flagellating and btc isn't even viable on a GPU. 

If the price of BTC increased to humongous degree, maybe one million $ per BTC, the scarcity of ASICS would make GPU profitable.

Funny enough, at that price, it would be anti economical to use energy for almost anything but bitcoin mining (why use energy to smelt steel when you can mine BTC at that price?), which would either collapse our civilization or sprun government to ban it alright.

 

A recent article about how BTC mining came to Kazakhistan, took subsidies, overloaded the grid, then left leaving an even more broken government behind, should serve as cautionary tale.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

14 hours ago, TetraSky said:

hough bitcoin has gone back up to August 2022's price, so I'm surprised any of them are still selling. Would've figured they'd be back to mining. Surely the other crypto trash are up too, no

Because you don’t mine bitcoin with gpus?

If to do you’re burning money, ASICS age what mines bitcoin nkw

[jagdtigger]

21 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Tough, it's not much different from car owner rolling back the odometer before selling their car.

At least you can prove that in case of a car, good luck with a GPU though....  Just one more reason why crypto shouldve got nuked in its infancy.....

[Kisai]

7 hours ago, Spotty said:

... Why? Why go through the effort?

Most people aren't going to check their memory chips or GPU dies, so why go through the effort? For the 1 in 10,000 customer who does check and complain that their memory chips look faded just refund them (or more likely just tell them to take a walk since used goods are sold as is). 

I've never seen anybody complaining about a failing graphics card and associate it with discolouration on the GPU package or memory chips.

Seems like a lot of extra effort to sell a graphics card when they could just as easily sell them as is and most people won't notice or care. 

Fly-by-night dropshippers do exactly this, They sell a few legitimate things to get their feedback high, and then switch to selling counterfeit stuff, and then vanish before the account gets suspended. That's why drop shippers love Amazon, because they can literately change the items being sold without losing the feedback. eBay the feedback goes against the seller, so that account is toast as soon as they get more than 1% negative feedback.

 

[SeriousDad69]

More FUD about used mining cards lol. Just buy from ebay with paypal, leave the card on furmark for 12-24 hours, and if it passes you're good to go. Anyone that has sold on ebay or used paypal to receive a payment before knows, they live to screw sellers over.

[Godlygamer23]

29 minutes ago, SeriousDad69 said:

leave the card on furmark for 12-24 hours, and if it passes you're good to go.

I don't agree with this. At most, you're straining the power delivery system, but drivers are set up to automatically undervolt and underclock graphics cards to prevent damage because otherwise, you would strain it too much. To get a better idea of stability, it's better to run a real benchmark like Superposition because that will actually push the card, and the GPU will hit its peak clocks, given certain temperatures. 

 

Additionally, in the past, on older hardware, I would run Furmark to "verify" an overclock, launch a game after a while, and the game would instantly crash, because Furmark is very canned, and even at that time, did not give you a real representation of stability. I've also had experiences of running a game where the GPU was under a lower load which caused instabilities because the clock speeds were higher due to the lower power load and temperatures. 

[StDragon]

26 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

To get a better idea of stability, it's better to run a real benchmark like Superposition because that will actually push the card, and the GPU will hit its peak clocks, given certain temperatures.

...or Nvidia could release their MATS and MODS utility to the open.

 

Apparently Nvidia gets real upset if anyone leaks them online.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

23 hours ago, Godlygamer23 said:

I work in the military industry, and counterfeit parts are a huge concern. Counterfeit part suppliers will do wild things to make things look like a legit part, including painting, remarking, etc. 

 

These graphics cards are akin to counterfeit material. Even though they're not using fake parts, they are being portrayed as something they're not. 

But would that be more on the lines of misrepresentation no? Like you wouldn't say a flooded car with a clean title sold as non-flood vehicle is a counterfeit? It's not a fake but people are purposely obscuring its troubled past. 

[SeriousDad69]

1 hour ago, Godlygamer23 said:

I don't agree with this. At most, you're straining the power delivery system, but drivers are set up to automatically undervolt and underclock graphics cards to prevent damage because otherwise, you would strain it too much. To get a better idea of stability, it's better to run a real benchmark like Superposition because that will actually push the card, and the GPU will hit its peak clocks, given certain temperatures. 

 

Additionally, in the past, on older hardware, I would run Furmark to "verify" an overclock, launch a game after a while, and the game would instantly crash, because Furmark is very canned, and even at that time, did not give you a real representation of stability. I've also had experiences of running a game where the GPU was under a lower load which caused instabilities because the clock speeds were higher due to the lower power load and temperatures. 

Either way you have weeks to get your money back. If you don't find out the card is defective before the ~60 day money back window paypal gives you is up, it's your fault at that point. Ebay and paypal absolutely love to screw sellers over, that's why I always think it's hilarious how many people freakout over buying used mining cards.