Comment by trenchpilgrim
10 hours ago
> My understanding is that refurbished GPUs from e.g. crypto mining are something people are warned away from, because they've often been run into the ground.
No, this wasn't the case. While there were never comprehensive studies various tech media purchased these cards to run testing and found that, other than scammers, they all performed to expectation.
You can buy used car tires with 1% of thread left and they'll perform amazingly during your one time test too
Car tire is a moving part that wears in use. Only moving parts a GPU has are its fans, which can be replaced. The rest may last really long, or fail brand new.
Believe it or not but the "really long time" you're mentioning is much less "long" when you run the card 24/7 at 100% in enclosed spaces
Electricity is a moving part btw, electronic components do wear and tear
Thermal cycling will eventually cause problems with continuity but I'm not sure that's really predictable. We have some really old GPUs that eventually had problems under load, we attributed it to thermal degradation as we had ruled out pretty much everything else.