Can electronics actually wear out?
Here’s a fun report from NASA that I love to cite (it is also the citation for my lifespan claim).
https://c3.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/ObservedFail...
Both pages are focused on aerospace engineering (and perhaps fault-tolerant systems in general), so I'm not sure how I'd rate them as authoritative sources for the lifespan of electronics in general. Possible faults in a gaming GPU might not be as critical if they cause something to fail once a year, for example.
Though I'm not sure how much actual damage you'd see in practice, whether the ICs tend to die with intense use before e.g. the capacitors mentioned above.
When I started buying new parts as an adult, the failure rates of e.g. GPUs were pretty disappointing in comparison to the biased expectations I had from those survivor PCs.
I'm really sad about new laptops having everything soldered on. If something fails, you either need a good reflow station (and skills) or you have to toss the whole thing, which is insane.
It also makes parts ridiculously expensive, like a system board for a Dell Precision now goes for ~$500 where it used to be under $100. All because the CPU, GPU, VRAM and even RAM are soldered on.
Honestly, I hate where all of this is going. So much for everyone going green.
It depends what you mean by "wear out". Hardware does fail with time.
To put things in perspective, not so long ago it was believed that below a certain stress delta some materials were immune to fatigue and practically eternal. However it was soon apparent that that belief was not factual, and a phenomenon labelled very high cycle fatigue started to become a research topic. This type of fatigue is characterized by cracks being induced even at very low stress levels due to defects such as impurities and even crystal size in metal matrices.
Not to mention crypto miners will often have the GPUs overclocked on top of running full tilt to get every last hash out of it. It's about as brutal of a situation as you can get for a GPU.
This is false because miners often undervolt to achieve better efficiency. The popular GPU mining algorithms are all memory-bound, so you can undervolt your core clocks quite a bit and still get >95% of the original performance.
For collage dorms for example rarely charge based on electricity use. Some apartment complexes also include electricity as part of the rent.
Those situations are rare. A student in a college dorm isn't going to be able to afford multiple GPUs for a mining rig, and if he's mining with one GPU, he's likely going to keep it when the crash comes rather than trying to sell it into a flooded market. Apartment mining is more believable, but even then power consumption is going to be an issue for them because of noise. They're also going to be vastly outnumbered (in terms of GPUs operated) by professional miners because most people don't have a few thousand dollars to drop on generating highly speculative assets.
I have met several counter examples.
Most people prioritize the longevity of the cards. Resale value is not negligible.
you absolutely can wear out a GPU with excessive mining.
Do you think the copper wiring in your house also wears out?
Another less related to electronics, is simple heat cycles.