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
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.
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. 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...
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. 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).
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.
Yeah I'm still waiting for nvidia's adopt a miners card again :laugh:
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.
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.