Wednesday, January 25th 2023
Crypto Miners Paint GDDR Memory Chips to Hide Wear and Tear
With the once-lucrative business of cryptocurrency mining now slowly falling out of favor for discrete graphics, crypto miners are turning their heads to creative solutions to "refurbish" and sell their remaining inventory to third-party users. When GPU components, such as the die or GDDR memory, overheat, they can produce visual signs of damage, such as discoloration or melting. Some miners have started painting the memory on their GPU's boards with special thermal paint to hide the wear and tear from the naked eye and make the GDDR chips appear new in hopes that no one would notice. According to Iskandar Souza and TecLab, their cases are now getting debunked.
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. According to the testing done by Iskandar Souza, you can see below the difference between a worn-out yellowish GDDR chip and its painted deception standing next to one another. Below you can also see the process of resoldering failed GPUs back in place. Crypto miners have been very careful to make them look almost as brand new, so GPU buyers from third-party sources need to be extra cautious before making a purchase.
Sources:
Iskandar Souza (YouTube), TecLab (YouTube), via Tom's Hardware
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. According to the testing done by Iskandar Souza, you can see below the difference between a worn-out yellowish GDDR chip and its painted deception standing next to one another. Below you can also see the process of resoldering failed GPUs back in place. Crypto miners have been very careful to make them look almost as brand new, so GPU buyers from third-party sources need to be extra cautious before making a purchase.
70 Comments on Crypto Miners Paint GDDR Memory Chips to Hide Wear and Tear
Don't buy a used card if you don't want to, but if someone tells you a 30-series or prior GPU wasn't mined on, they're lying. And you have no way of knowing one way or the other.I guess I should prefaced it with that. *If* you do your due diligence, there's very little risk. If you don't know anything about computers or their components, then yes, you should probably stay away from buying used.I've long since sold all my cards. It doesn't matter how upset you get about this, nothing will change the fact that "mined on" cards are a safer buy than getting them from a gamer. Or even an average PC user, for that matter. It's just a pet peeve of mine in the PC space when people who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about chime in with completely uninformed opinions, that they only have out of bitterness and not any real concern. Poking holes straight through that is fun and easy.
Please explain to me how that works. This could be revolutionary information for the semiconductor industry.
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-08/bitcoin-miner-marathon-s-loss-widens-after-coin-prices-tumble
They are using 280 Million watts of power in Texas now, supposed to be run from clean wind power….. it’s a waste and will only hurt communities who have the most need.
Yeah i'd like to see any long term effects of that.
someone that knows what they are doing when mining will give you a much better card than a new one from factory in terms of reliability, without considering dust and possible fan wear of course.
most mining cards run undervolted so the die dragradation is gonna be close to zero starting from the fact that at stock voltages the degradation is already negligible, also the vrm caps as long as there is some air flow and stay @95c will last towards 15 years easily
people probably buying the cheapest of the cheapest from god knows where and blaming it on mining, when in reality the card probably wasnt even used for mining, most likely were used on asian "gaming cafes" with awful PSU, horrible case airflow, high ambient temperatures etc. Of course it wont last long, likely 3 years and 4 at most and they will just "reflow" it a couple times and then sell it to the first dummy that takes it for some money.
and im not here defending mining, despite itGPU's core, memory, VRM's, PCB, fans, ect dont care for how long they run, only the conditions.
I'd be more concerned with all the nooby miners that ran cards on default clocks, vcore, and fanspeeds, and let them cook.
Although look at the 3080. I remember gamers complaining when the VRAM was hitting 105'C and throttling. They say it's in spec but I imagine that effecting the lifespan a fair bit. So basically any second hand card is a risk.
I remember mine hitting 96'C both gaming and mining. Swapped out the crappy chewing gum looking stuff NV fitted, with Gelid Extreme pads and it dropped to 82'C mining and gaming. Though it did also raise the core temp by a few degrees too.
Also bitcoin is not a ponzi, NFTs are not a scam, and crypto in general is not a fraud, much less a fad or craze.
I dunno I only have one word to describe what I feel and I guess that is "contempt"You tell me, dude. Hardware which is heat discolored and has physical packaging damaged from heat and current is totally in perfect shape or working order yeah! Might even work for 15 minutes underclocked before it croaks. True bargain!
Not to mention cards that could have gotten people thousands of hours of creativity or entertainment, or used for noble purposes such as protein folding for cancer research were practically spent on generating some fake wealth digital token to fuel the largest ponzi in history. Sounds like an excellent deal to me, just imagine if you fed the hashing power of the Ethereum network at its height into folding at home instead. What a waste.
I think the most wholesome story I've ever heard about crypto speculation is that someone managed to make enough to pay for their daughter's tuition once. Which may also be the most noble use of this ponzi if anything... I still hate it.
Before it just wasn't selling, now they are investing time into them. Good. I hope they waste more time, I hope they sit longer. Until they are too out moded to be useful. I want these "investments" to sit as long as humanly possible in the upper left shelf of their closet. Depreciating.
I'm surprised so many tech new outlets forgot about crypto hashers using freaking pressure-washers to make the cards look new. Then one hasher in/around Germany sells pressured washed cards, doesn't dry them on top of that and then suddenly AMD is demonized by half the tech places that don't ask difficult questions like, "Hm, only one repair shop on the entire planet is reporting this!" :rolleyes:
And they're called crypto hashers, because they're generating hashes. If they were crypo "miners" they'd have a 20 pound pick axe and would be doing actual work contributing to society instead of driving up electricity costs.Hey, thems some nice clamps!
www.google.com/search?q=crypto+miners+pressure+washing+video+cards
Also they're crypto hashers as the cards are used to generate hashes whereas an actual miner uses a 20 pound pick axe and does actual work contributing to society. I used the "miners" in the search because otherwise the results would be skewed because people don't know how to English! :mad:
I guess no one has seen how cards look like coming from RMA channels. Someone saw few and makes an article... great.
I'll remind you that we're on thread about miners painting memory chips, it's crazy you're arguing about this.I know, which is why I wouldn't buy one nor would I tell anyone to do so. But strange, why would miners lie about it if you claim it makes no difference ? Weird.
I also bought ~4 years ago a GTX1080ti, with warranty, for ~$550, that did not work, sent it back and bought a new RTX2080.
As a peace of mind - I won't buy any graphics card without at least 6 months of warranty and full box, specially a mining card.
How it is related to miners? These are dead parts and failed cheap unprofessional repairs, don't matter it is from mining or gaming.
You can't bake a vram like this if you use it in controlled mining environment. (24/7 constant temperature, custom bios, fan profile etc)
But cards can fail, and sometimes baking it helps (but just for hours or days). But there is a professional way to repair those cards (reballing, gpu or vram replace)
I used a lot of nvidia tesla cards that work 24/7 for 5-6y and none any of the parts are discolored.
So i think these pictures fake, these components are baked with external tools not with mining.
24/7 constant temperature fixed fan (let say 60-70C) is much better than few hours daily gaming (20 to 90 or even higher). Like with cars, 100k mileage in city is much worse condition than 200k on highway only. A professional miner cares with their tools.
I dont want to protect the miners, but i have experience with 24/7 running hardwares.