Hardware & Technical Now that the miners ar done: DO NOT buy used AMD Polaris cards!

[Shadowdancer]

After the another-stupid-cryptocurrency fad making AMD Polaris cards rare has ended, "miners" are apparently dumping their hardware.

Be extremely wary of buying those cards! They are the equivalent of a "used horses" sale suspiciously located behind a racetrack and smelling of shoe polish.

Any such operation will have run the hardware at its absolute limits, so it will have suffered stress equivalent to years of regular use. It is very possible that even if you can get an original invoice (which is unlikely because most of those cards were diverted before they even hit retail channels), you may be denied warranty for that reason.

 

[Porina]

It all comes down to cost. Do you buy a used card (miner or not) or new? There has to be sufficient price differential for the used card to look appealing over a new one.

Personally I'm not afraid of mining cards as I do distributed computing over winter, and run cards 24/7 in those cases. The fan might die a bit earlier from continuous use but that's about it. Serious miners would optimise power efficiency compared to gamers who favour performance, so it is quite possible they're running cooler than gaming loads. Also the RX 500 series hasn't been out for long anyway, so wouldn't have had prolonged runtime on them regardless. Similarly the recent mining boom only really kicked off some months ago so many cards wouldn't be that old anyway.

Still, this is rather moot since in a quick look, there are still no new cards available from a few random UK retailers I looked at. On ebay... it looks like "new" 580 4GB are going for over £300, with 8GB models closer to £400. Doesn't look like any obvious dumping yet, and new supply still hasn't caught up. There's a seller with five "like new" cards which are claimed not to have been used for mining... really?

My hope is that there will be a flood on the used market and I'll snap them up at that point for winter heating. I'm not holding my breath though. The crash hasn't been as deep as some made out. It can still be profitable, but significantly reduced from the height of the craze. I think those invested in it will keep running for as long as they don't start to lose money before dumping.

 

[shadragon]

Buying used gear is always caveat emptor. It could be stolen, unreliable or abused.

Or 'penny wise, pound foolish' as my Dad used to say.