That makes me angry, it should make you angry too.
Cryptocurrencies are not inherently good or valuable and cryptocurrency people aren't special and their world-burning habits and desires need not be privileged.
This is mostly a myth, miners cards are usually undervolted, and only a subset of the card is used.
If your CPU only used it's floating point unit then it wouldn't be as intense as if you were using the whole thing.
The only potential issue is thermal damage, but that's hard to place and has to be close to, or in excess of 90-110c.
The excusemaking is pernicious.
But I agree with the first sentence. Lots of miner cards are undervolted because what matters is performance per watt, just like many server cpus.
I've been idly mining on an RTX3080 for 6 months now, and the hashrate has slowly gone down about 20% since new. I suspect the thermal pads on the memory chips are slowly cooking. I replaced them once already and restored a bit of hashrate.
Did it pay for the electricity and the card itself at the current BTC price?
Actually, miners optimise for computation/kWh of electricity (versus computation/16ms of time for gamers), which leads to running mining GPUs at significantly lower wear and tear level (lower voltage scaling, lower clock rate, etc) than gaming GPUs.
> having ex-miner cards burn out is a pretty common thing on the used market.
Having used GPUs in general burn out is somewhat common, but it's less common for ex-miner cards than for ex-gamer cards.
This doesn't make me angry, and I don't think it should make you angry either.
From March 2018:
Today, a half-megawatt mine, Miehe says, “is nothing.” The commercial miners now pouring into the valley are building sites with tens of thousands of servers and electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these operations will soon be considered small-scale.
For people clamoring for renewable energy, this is an obscene amount of energy needed to do a single task - mine bitcoin. Which should make it even more obscene that all of that energy is being used for what? The benefit of a few people. Staggering to think how common this is and the article even states a 30 megawatt system is small compared to some of the other sites that are out there.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-m...
Just because a card can’t be used by gamers doesn’t mean the card must be tossed, there are plenty of non-gaming uses such as AI. You’ll probably see an aftermarket for both types of cards.
Also, like regular graphics cards, newer versions are highly prized so one might say that graphics cards as an industry is already all about e-waste. Unless you’d like to buy my Radeon 9800 or my GTX 1070? They’re still perfectly good for gaming… except everybody wants the new RTX ray tracing etc.
This is highly inaccurate, particularly on the used market. People want cards that can handle whatever games they play within their budget. A lot of older cards run tons of games quite well still, especially if you accept lower framerates / resolutions.
RTX in particular isn't actually that coveted by gamers from what I've seen. It's seen as a nice-to-have at best.
Or to run higher resolutions, or to play flight simulator at reasonable refresh rates, etc etc.
what you are looking at is a future that is very, very bright for BOINC and folding@home scores.
the cards will never be worthless, if nothing else someone will buy them up for 25 bucks and store them until the (inevitable) next mining crisis, and any reasonable miner is going to chose 25 bucks versus having to pay to dispose of them properly (ahahah, sorry, we all know if it comes to that they're going in the nearest creek).
anyway you get the point though, the value is never going to actual zero, people will buy them for development work, for grid compute, or just as a bet on the next mining crisis. A hundred bucks for a card is better than nothing.
Not discounting it, but I tend to be more interested in the . well . interesting conversations and questions then to go down the angry / upset / outraged path.
The no video out cards used in mining are already out of gamers hands. If they throw them away (they won't - existing product is working fine) they would no need to buy non-gaming product. Finally, I think you underestimate the value of the existing product, if they did want to resell into gaming market they would probably find success.
There's a shortage of Nvidia card/chips after all.
Edit: Now I read the article, this is literally only being added to new cards and with a warning.