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
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70 Comments on Crypto Miners Paint GDDR Memory Chips to Hide Wear and Tear

#51
Yraggul666
caroline!The raw toxicity and unchained hatred in this thread is simply amazing. Keep it up guys, it's easy to talk when you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth.
Listen here missy you're too easily amazed, allow me to amaze you even further.
See those specs? They're real. Nobody gave those to me.
See the pic? It's real too. Nobody gave those to me either.
When my father lived we almost killed each other a few times and he died an alcoholic; my mother was a teacher for almost 40 years and has under 400Eur pension;
all that being true and said, you probably wouldn't be amazed where i'd suggest you shove a silver spoon if you ever found one somewhere.

And yeah, i hope they all grow old with their GPUs on their shelves and i'm stopping here 'cause if i "uncahin my hatred and raw toxicity" aka speak my mind i'll be banned from this forum.

P.S: don't worry missy, i'm still in pretty ok shape, i can keep it up no problem, but thank you very much for the good thoughts.
Posted on Reply
#52
Dr. Dro
ExcuseMeWtfFalse. NFTs promise to have a non-fungible object of some value, whereas most of them are worthless crap. This fulfills definition of scam as well.
If you're referring to my post I was being violently sarcastic, if that wasn't obvious enough
masterdeejayBadly reflowed and baked GPU and vram?
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.
Your critical mistake is treating GPUs as a desirable item to which you care for and conduct proper maintenance, not as a tool, aka an expendable asset. For you, gamer, with your limited budget and tech acumen, this is the case. For a miner? Not really.

No one mining for profit on a large scale operation took the time to carefully optimize and review cards one by one for the most efficient operation, this is costly and in addition to that a time waste, because miners are racing against the difficulty clock to maximize profits.

This isn't fake and it's not the first time mining refuse has been peddled to unsuspecting gamers, this slop has been pushed for quite a while now, initially through mining parts being recycled into low quality PCBs and sold as new through unlicensed Chinese manufacturers. It's intensely prevalent with Radeon RX 400/500 series GPUs.
WorringlyIndifferentDon'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.


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.
I've never mined on my RTX 3090. I wasn't about to torture the most expensive piece of hardware I had ever purchased at the time to make some fake money at a rate it'd never pay for itself. But due to this I can't even get a nice price on it anymore. No one believes me when I say I hadn't, especially considered its a launch day card.

I assure you my GPU is in better physical condition than any miner slop you could ever show me, even those run in these fantasy undervolted conditions with AC on 24/7 and regularly revised cards (read: AC bill plus downtime miners for profit would never ever expend). Spare us all...
Posted on Reply
#53
AusWolf
As much as I'm speaking against my habit of turning hardware over quite rapidly due to my insatiable curiosity, my general advice will be: don't buy used.

As for me, I'll just get into the habit of buying stuff less frequently (it's too expensive anyway), and repurposing my used stuff instead of selling.
TumbleGeorgeI will never trust a crypto miner no matter what he swears. The goal of miners has always been to "mine" as much as possible, in as little time as possible, before increasing of the computational complexity or various other costs become involved, which reduce the profitability of "mining". Such people who are engaged in an activity that is already declared illegal in some countries tend to lie more than other people.
Especially people who believe in fake money that is not legal tender. People like that either have something to hide from their government, or just read far too many conspiracy theories. I'm not saying that real money is good, crypto is bad. All I'm saying is that I find it extremely unbelievable that any decentralized currency with no guarantee is in better hands than my British Pounds in the bank (which is proven by recent events).
Posted on Reply
#54
bogmali
In Orbe Terrum Non Visi
Last warning, stick to the topic and not your "personal" bias against Crypto.
Posted on Reply
#55
droopyRO
Broken ProcessorWhat would the police do? It's a civil matter you could try county court but most items are sold as seen unless warranty is stated by seller. Even if the item is new try going to the police it's still a civil matter unless fraud but even then they will just hand you a reference number.
That is the last resort, i never been scammed like that, so that it requires the po-po. If you dislike the second hand market so much, then quit smoking, drinking, eating out, going out with your friends and buy a new PC component. Or quit PC gaming, AMD, Nvidia, Intel are not your friends, the only thing they care for is money and you would too if you were in their shoes ;)
Posted on Reply
#56
RegaeRevaeb
This headline should end with a colon followed by "reports" for accuracy. When I first saw it I got my pitchfork out to find all the crypto miners ;-)
Posted on Reply
#57
Dr. Dro
RegaeRevaebThis headline should end with a colon followed by "reports" for accuracy. When I first saw it I got my pitchfork out to find all the crypto miners ;-)
I speak the language of the videos used as a source, and if you ask me, it's perfectly accurate as it is, the only thing missing is the context from the country's market reality and I am all too happy to provide.

Cryptocurrency has basically completely subsided in our country - and miners have been getting increasingly bold and desperate to shift their expensive gear right as there's a strong rejection of used high-end GPUs specifically due to mining damage in our unfriendly climate. Hence, the whole situation at hand. It's greatly affected the used market - if I tried to sell my TUF OC 3090 today, I could ask *maybe* 5,999 BRL on it (somewhat north of $1000 USD), and it'd be a tough sell for what would be remarkably little money in Brazil (despite seeming like an astoundingly great deal for the seller from an American POV, a 3090 should be selling for $600 USD in America for most cases today) - I would be able to sell it because my card is pristine, factory-sealed with the warranty seal, and I have the box, receipt/proof of purchase, warranty card and everything intact for its new owner... after the MercadoLibre marketplace's commission I'd have maybe 5k on hand - this would not be enough to purchase an RTX 4070 Ti to replace it, these sell in the local market for around 7,299 to 8,499 (ROG Strix model, which is what i'd purchase at a minimum) - that's why *I* gave up on selling my card.

This has been going on for some time - last year, Afox (which doesn't seem to hold an AMD AIB license) got caught redhanded by the same media outlet selling Radeon RX 580s built out of recycled PCBs, most of them with RX 470/470D/570/580 2048SP (China-only SKUs) variants of Polaris dies, many of which had visible heat damage such as discolored substrate and/or yellowed epoxy due to being worked to the extreme for very prolonged periods of time - these are obviously being harvested from mining waste boards and slapped onto a low quality, recycle PCB, then sold full price through retail channels here. At the height of the GPU crisis, these RX 580s were actually being sold for almost $1000 USD locally. It actually resulted in some hysteria and even got the law involved - though they appear to have settled amicably. If you're interested:


The sources are trustworthy - TecLab is huge in Brazil - Ronaldo is a former overclocking champion employed by Galax and his channel is not any different in nature from, say, der8auer's. His channel has over 250,000 subscribers. The other guy, Paulo Gomes (featured on Iskandar's channel), owns a high-end lab and is one of the two trustworthy technicians which can fix a graphics card in the country, the other being Burti from Harteck tecnologia. They're known to work with GPU companies' RMA departments.

I'm not against the idea of recycling, it could potentially reduce e-waste if done correctly and honestly (though I personally would never trust such a heavily used processor - I own an EVGA GTX 780 which was heavily used by its previous owner and it resets at random unless I heavily underclock it), but these could never, ever be sold in the retail channel as brand new products carrying AMD's brand. They should be cheap and sold on the down low, and that's something I respect on Aliexpress brands that sell exclusively through their stores such as Veineda - they never claimed to be all-new hardware or distribute them to the general retail channel in an attempt to pass as a licensed card intended for the end-user DIY market.
Posted on Reply
#58
ThrashZone
Hi,
Yeah I'm still waiting for nvidia's adopt a miners card again :laugh:
Posted on Reply
#59
RegaeRevaeb
Dr. DroI speak the language of the videos used as a source, and if you ask me, it's perfectly accurate as it is, the only thing missing is the context from the country's market reality and I am all too happy to provide.

Cryptocurrency has basically completely subsided in our country - and miners have been getting increasingly bold and desperate to shift their expensive gear right as there's a strong rejection of used high-end GPUs specifically due to mining damage in our unfriendly climate. Hence, the whole situation at hand. It's greatly affected the used market - if I tried to sell my TUF OC 3090 today, I could ask *maybe* 5,999 BRL on it (somewhat north of $1000 USD), and it'd be a tough sell for what would be remarkably little money in Brazil (despite seeming like an astoundingly great deal for the seller from an American POV, a 3090 should be selling for $600 USD in America for most cases today) - I would be able to sell it because my card is pristine, factory-sealed with the warranty seal, and I have the box, receipt/proof of purchase, warranty card and everything intact for its new owner... after the MercadoLibre marketplace's commission I'd have maybe 5k on hand - this would not be enough to purchase an RTX 4070 Ti to replace it, these sell in the local market for around 7,299 to 8,499 (ROG Strix model, which is what i'd purchase at a minimum) - that's why *I* gave up on selling my card.

This has been going on for some time - last year, Afox (which doesn't seem to hold an AMD AIB license) got caught redhanded by the same media outlet selling Radeon RX 580s built out of recycled PCBs, most of them with RX 470/470D/570/580 2048SP (China-only SKUs) variants of Polaris dies, many of which had visible heat damage such as discolored substrate and/or yellowed epoxy due to being worked to the extreme for very prolonged periods of time - these are obviously being harvested from mining waste boards and slapped onto a low quality, recycle PCB, then sold full price through retail channels here. At the height of the GPU crisis, these RX 580s were actually being sold for almost $1000 USD locally. It actually resulted in some hysteria and even got the law involved - though they appear to have settled amicably. If you're interested:


The sources are trustworthy - TecLab is huge in Brazil - Ronaldo is a former overclocking champion employed by Galax and his channel is not any different in nature from, say, der8auer's. His channel has over 250,000 subscribers. The other guy, Paulo Gomes (featured on Iskandar's channel), owns a high-end lab and is one of the two trustworthy technicians which can fix a graphics card in the country, the other being Burti from Harteck tecnologia. They're known to work with GPU companies' RMA departments.

I'm not against the idea of recycling, it could potentially reduce e-waste if done correctly and honestly (though I personally would never trust such a heavily used processor - I own an EVGA GTX 780 which was heavily used by its previous owner and it resets at random unless I heavily underclock it), but these could never, ever be sold in the retail channel as brand new products carrying AMD's brand. They should be cheap and sold on the down low, and that's something I respect on Aliexpress brands that sell exclusively through their stores such as Veineda - they never claimed to be all-new hardware or distribute them to the general retail channel in an attempt to pass as a licensed card intended for the end-user DIY market.
You misunderstood me. My point was only that in English the headline suffers some lack of clarity because it could literally be read that every single person/user/etc. was performing the action -- or of fence here if you will.

I was being cheeky (as a bona fide former reporter and editor) about the writing of the head and not the content or sources. In news reporting, attribution goes hand in hand with clarity.
Posted on Reply
#60
tony359
from the video it seems the ‘paint’ also includes the label of the chip.
I find unlikely that a miner suddenly has the ability of reproducing the text printed on a memory chip to hide a little yellowing to be honest.
Posted on Reply
#61
TumbleGeorge
tony359from the video it seems the ‘paint’ also includes the label of the chip.
I find unlikely that a miner suddenly has the ability of reproducing the text printed on a memory chip to hide a little yellowing to be honest.
Painting seems to be wrong. They must be using diluted acid to clean yellow corrosion.
Posted on Reply
#62
Broken Processor
droopyROThat is the last resort, i never been scammed like that, so that it requires the po-po. If you dislike the second hand market so much, then quit smoking, drinking, eating out, going out with your friends and buy a new PC component. Or quit PC gaming, AMD, Nvidia, Intel are not your friends, the only thing they care for is money and you would too if you were in their shoes.
Learn to read and follow conversation's I never said I was scammed like that or that I only buy second hand and I'm typically a seller of used. But I will be more used because buying new seems to be getting taken for a ride or being a early adapter test pilot as lots are discovering this gen with cables setting cards on fire, fault vapour chambers, getting your ram to work or cooling the furnace that is your flagship cpu . Finally if someone drinks or smokes it's none of you bloody business.
Posted on Reply
#63
R-T-B
Count von SchwalbeAnd the likelihood of a mining card being from a mining farm is extremely high.
Did not deny it.
Posted on Reply
#64
MrNobodyHD
GPUs should get some kind of logging system, that shows a app ID for previous apps run in the hardware for this exact reason. geforce control panel have a hardware log with all info about the GPU and last used info
Posted on Reply
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