Hacker News Reader

Comment by brianbreslin | Hacker News Reader

How did this code damage computers? Overheating? Kept fans running higher?

I believe the concern was that it ran on GPUs (mining on CPUs hasn't been cost-effective for quite some time). Since GPUs are rarely run constantly and don't see loads like mining produces during typical use, their owners might have overclocked them under those assumptions. With those assumptions violated, I wouldn't be surprised to see cards fail prematurely.

Don't even need to overclock them. Given a sample size of 14000 GPUs, I would expect a couple hundred to at least bluescreen simply from being placed under a sustained serious load for the first time.

Try running the FurMark stress test on any given machine. If you don't get glitches or a reboot, that GPU is above-average stability in my experience.

This is a sad comment on the state of consumer hardware. Speaking from my viewpoint as a computational chemist, a video card that fails memtestG80 is not merchantable and gets slung back at the manufacturer.

After a while you have learned how fast companies deal with RMAs and you know that factory-overcooked hardware is next-to-useless.

>This is a sad comment on the state of consumer hardware

And also incorrect. A system crashing on a combined Linpack/Furmark load is defective or contains a defective component. Even extremely thermally-limited laptops do not suffer from this due to protection mechanisms.

I don't think it'd damage the computers, if it did, it'd be very minor, like you said. I'd say the biggest effect would be people's electrical bills being higher.

Bitcoin mining on Laptop GPU is known to destroy whole machines (usually by overheating several parts of the motherboard and ruining them... also ruining the GPU itself too)

Quite a bit higher, in fact. Under full load a fanboy graphics card dissipates 100 - 150 W. A wattmeter is instructive toy.

I did some GPU mining for about 5 minutes once. Had to stop it immediately because the noise my GPU was making definitely wasn't good for it. The fan still rattles a bit sometimes from the 5 minutes it was being run at 100%

GPUs are not really designed for 100% load for prolonged periods of time

just thermodynamics really. the cpu cycles spent mining bitcoins are in fact costing the user something.

While mining litecoins, a capacitor in my power supply blew up. I saw a huge jolt of blue, my monitor lost connection and finished up with some smoke.

GPUs overheating and getting damaged from said heat. Running a GPU at 100% for days is probably a good way to burn it up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com