Crypto Miners Paint GDDR Memory Chips to Hide Wear and Tear

[AleksandarK]

With the once-lucrative business of cryptocurrency mining now slowly falling out of favor for discrete graphics, crypto miners are turning their heads to creative solutions to "refurbish" and sell their remaining inventory to third-party users. When GPU components, such as the die or GDDR memory, overheat, they can produce visual signs of damage, such as discoloration or melting. Some miners have started painting the memory on their GPU's boards with special thermal paint to hide the wear and tear from the naked eye and make the GDDR chips appear new in hopes that no one would notice. According to Iskandar Souza and TecLab, their cases are now getting debunked.

As these reports note, miners are removing the stock cooling systems from GPUs to install a third-party solution or recently tried to resolder failed GPU dies back in place and paint the yellowish GDDR memory chips. According to the testing done by Iskandar Souza, you can see below the difference between a worn-out yellowish GDDR chip and its painted deception standing next to one another. Below you can also see the process of resoldering failed GPUs back in place. Crypto miners have been very careful to make them look almost as brand new, so GPU buyers from third-party sources need to be extra cautious before making a purchase.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Assimilator]

Inb4 crypto miners on this forum bombing this thread with "but I take AMAZING care of MY cards and ALWAYS undervolt them and NEVER overheat them".

NOBODY CARES that you are allegedly the exception to the rule.

 

[ZoneDymo]

Dont buy used, dont buy new, just dont buy at all....sadly...screw em all

 

[the54thvoid]

I read a report elsewhere that suggested a recent batch of faililng AMD 6900's was likely sourced from mining stock that had sat in damp warehouse conditions. I'm pretty sure the hobby miners tried to look after their cards but on the industrial scale, I doubt it very much.

 

[mahanddeem]

This crypto mining bs should burn to hell with no return

 

[droopyRO]

Inb4 crypto miners on this forum bombing this thread with "but I take AMAZING care of MY cards and ALWAYS undervolt them and NEVER overheat them".

NOBODY CARES that you are allegedly the exception to the rule.

You need to learn how to buy second hand stuff. It's not something for any novice, but you can always ask someone to help you test the card in person or if buying from Ebay you are pretty much covered by them. Also warranty is transferable in most places. So unless you can afford to buy new, learn to buy second hand or opened box/resealed items.

 

[WorringlyIndifferent]

I've said it before countless times, but "mined on" GPUs are exactly identical to ones that have been gamed on. There is no detectable difference - you have literally no way of knowing. The reason you have no way of knowing is because mining doesn't do anything different than any other use of a graphics card. The only thing that *might* matter is that fan bearings tend to wear out much faster (in terms of years of service) because they're running essentially 24/7. Everything else in the graphics card is exactly the same as new, same reliability - actually higher, since failure rates on new cards are highest right after purchase due to them not having been tested for sustained (days to weeks) periods.

I've bought cards that had clearly been mined on in a shed and were filthy. A few with actual water damage or rust on the coolers. You know the worst thing that happened? I had to replace some fans. I had multiple RX 480/580s that were mined on literally almost constantly for 7+ years and are now in service in other PCs. All of them still work.

This whole "mined GPUs are risky" thing is bitterness from people who didn't mine. Oops, I said it. It was annoying for me too, which is why I started mining. I would much, MUCH rather buy a used card from another miner than from a gamer. Miners were overwhelmingly doing it for profit, which means you need to keep your equipment in good working order. The average gamer doesn't even begin to know or care about PC maintenance.

Mining GPUs are fine. Don't buy them from China or overseas, obviously, but if you're in the US, Canada, western Europe, etc then the only thing you have to worry about is *possibly* replacing fans. Most cards that aren't from Zotac don't even require that much. Zotac cards pretty much guarantee the need for fan replacement, so keep that in mind. If replacing fans or thermal paste scares you, guess what: your only method of being certain a GPU hasn't been mined on is if you buy new. There is no way to tell, there is no physical evidence, and nothing stopping anyone from lying to you and saying "oh yeah for sure this card was never mined on, totally."

 

[64K]

Use that gray matter between your ears and like everything else you will be fine.

 

[maxfly]

This is hilarious. Crypto clowns just can't be halfway decent human beings. Oops fried these here cards darn it! Hey, I've got a great idea that noooobody will notice. Paint em and resell em!

Brings to mind Panteras album cover of Vulgar Display of Power for some reason...

 

[Xuper]

someone is selling XFX Merc 6900XT with price around $350 , so fishy ?

 

[Assimilator]

I've said it before countless times, but "mined on" GPUs are exactly identical to ones that have been gamed on. There is no detectable difference - you have literally no way of knowing. The reason you have no way of knowing is because mining doesn't do anything different than any other use of a graphics card. The only thing that *might* matter is that fan bearings tend to wear out much faster (in terms of years of service) because they're running essentially 24/7. Everything else in the graphics card is exactly the same as new, same reliability - actually higher, since failure rates on new cards are highest right after purchase due to them not having been tested for sustained (days to weeks) periods.

I've bought cards that had clearly been mined on in a shed and were filthy. A few with actual water damage or rust on the coolers. You know the worst thing that happened? I had to replace some fans. I had multiple RX 480/580s that were mined on literally almost constantly for 7+ years and are now in service in other PCs. All of them still work.

This whole "mined GPUs are risky" thing is bitterness from people who didn't mine. Oops, I said it. It was annoying for me too, which is why I started mining. I would much, MUCH rather buy a used card from another miner than from a gamer. Miners were overwhelmingly doing it for profit, which means you need to keep your equipment in good working order. The average gamer doesn't even begin to know or care about PC maintenance.

Mining GPUs are fine. Don't buy them from China or overseas, obviously, but if you're in the US, Canada, western Europe, etc then the only thing you have to worry about is *possibly* replacing fans. Most cards that aren't from Zotac don't even require that much. Zotac cards pretty much guarantee the need for fan replacement, so keep that in mind. If replacing fans or thermal paste scares you, guess what: your only method of being certain a GPU hasn't been mined on is if you buy new. There is no way to tell, there is no physical evidence, and nothing stopping anyone from lying to you and saying "oh yeah for sure this card was never mined on, totally."

Right on time, exactly as predicted.

Your whole argument is BS because graphics cards aren't mechanical components that either don't work the first time they're used, or if they do will likely work for a long time. Thermal stress is a thing, so is thermal cycling, so is electromigration, so is a plethora of other factors that GPU designers and manufacturers don't cater for because the use-case they design for is not 24/7/365 activity.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

It seems like a good business niche for sellers of suitable paints for coloring memory chips.

 

[trsttte]

I've said it before countless times, but "mined on" GPUs are exactly identical to ones that have been gamed on. There is no detectable difference - you have literally no way of knowing. The reason you have no way of knowing is because mining doesn't do anything different than any other use of a graphics card. The only thing that *might* matter is that fan bearings tend to wear out much faster (in terms of years of service) because they're running essentially 24/7. Everything else in the graphics card is exactly the same as new, same reliability - actually higher, since failure rates on new cards are highest right after purchase due to them not having been tested for sustained (days to weeks) periods.

You just disproved your own statement. They are the same if you compare a 10 years old gaming card with a 1 or 2 years old mining card. And even then it's not really the same, a gaming card will be constantly cycling between heating and cooling down while a mining card will stay at a set point for weeks on end.

In some ways a mining card can be better (like a used car that only did long distance highways is better than one that did short city commutes), in others is worse by having endured industrial level stress (running constantly at higher avg temps and during more total hours during lifetime).

The generalization is garbage as generalizations usually are.

someone is selling XFX Merc 6900XT with price around $350 , so fishy ?

If it's too good to be true it's usually a scam.

 

[DeeJay1001]

I've said it before countless times, but "mined on" GPUs are exactly identical to ones that have been gamed on. There is no detectable difference - you have literally no way of knowing. The reason you have no way of knowing is because mining doesn't do anything different than any other use of a graphics card. The only thing that *might* matter is that fan bearings tend to wear out much faster (in terms of years of service) because they're running essentially 24/7. Everything else in the graphics card is exactly the same as new, same reliability - actually higher, since failure rates on new cards are highest right after purchase due to them not having been tested for sustained (days to weeks) periods.

I've bought cards that had clearly been mined on in a shed and were filthy. A few with actual water damage or rust on the coolers. You know the worst thing that happened? I had to replace some fans. I had multiple RX 480/580s that were mined on literally almost constantly for 7+ years and are now in service in other PCs. All of them still work.

This whole "mined GPUs are risky" thing is bitterness from people who didn't mine. Oops, I said it. It was annoying for me too, which is why I started mining. I would much, MUCH rather buy a used card from another miner than from a gamer. Miners were overwhelmingly doing it for profit, which means you need to keep your equipment in good working order. The average gamer doesn't even begin to know or care about PC maintenance.

Mining GPUs are fine. Don't buy them from China or overseas, obviously, but if you're in the US, Canada, western Europe, etc then the only thing you have to worry about is *possibly* replacing fans. Most cards that aren't from Zotac don't even require that much. Zotac cards pretty much guarantee the need for fan replacement, so keep that in mind. If replacing fans or thermal paste scares you, guess what: your only method of being certain a GPU hasn't been mined on is if you buy new. There is no way to tell, there is no physical evidence, and nothing stopping anyone from lying to you and saying "oh yeah for sure this card was never mined on, totally."

100% agree.

I'd much rather buy a card from a hobbyist miner over a gamer. The average miner is almost certainly more knowledgeable when it comes to the use, maintenance, testing, and re-sale of hardware. Thats not to mention the mining workload is not nearly as destructive to the components of a GPU as the gaming/desktop workload.

I mined till it wasn't profitable, cleaned all my cards well, and sold them off. Not a single one of the cards I sold has had any issue whatsoever. I'm not surprised by this either, all my cards ran at or under 60C constantly, low voltages, low core clocks, and fan curves tuned to minimize the noise and dust while maintaining low temps. I'm not alone with how I ran my cards, Tuning for temps, power usage and stability was the norm not the exception.

 

[Steevo]

I wouldn’t buy used for the time being unless I personally knew the seller and knew it wasn’t used for mining, both as I don’t want to buy problems for cheap and because miners deserve to lose all of their investment for generating nothing of value while consuming energy and driving up the cost of products for users.

 

[Sithaer]

My last brand new GPU was a GTX 950 when it was actually new, used that card for nearly 3 years but after that I stoped buying brand new cards as they are way too overpriced where I live and I'm not exactly rich.

Bought a second hand admittedly ex miner RX 570 but it sill had like 2+ years local-ish retail warranty left on it so I did not care much.
Used that card for almost 3 years then I took it apart and repasted it/changed pads and sold it on the same second hand market in a still solid working condition.

After that I bought a supposedly gamer EVGA FTW ACX GTX 1070 which was in a worse physical condition but the owner cleaned it out at least /repasted it and gave me some warranty, this one also worked fine and I ended up selling it 1+ year later when the prices finally started to go down. 'For this card I went to meet the seller in person actually and checked the card before buying'

Yet again I bought a second hand RTX 3060 Ti with a questionable background since its a LHR variant but again I was given warranty and the seller was reputable so I went for it.
Card came in a pretty much mint condition not even a scratch on it nor visible dust on it and worked right out of the box + I made sure to buy a model with a dual Bios switch in case the previous owner edited one of them but those also work the way they should.
Not long ago I've decided to take apart the card to repaste it cause the temps were going higher than normal, apparently the factory paste was a pretty bad quality one and it was completely dried out. 'probably it finished drying out while I was using it since it had good temps when I started using it'
Since the card was taken apart I took a good look at the PCB and everything else and it had no weird colored spots or anything and the pads are in good condition, simply repasted the card and it droped the temps by ~10 celsius or so and now its working perfectly. '~60C under load with 1400-1500 fan RPM max'

Second hand is alright just gotta do some research and make sure the seller is not a complete random with no or bad background on the site, luckily we have a pretty good second hand marketplace/forum in my country and so far everything I/my brother bought there worked fine. 'ppl take the positive/negative feedback pretty seriously there'

 

[Vya Domus]

I've said it before countless times, but "mined on" GPUs are exactly identical to ones that have been gamed on. There is no detectable difference - you have literally no way of knowing. The reason you have no way of knowing is because mining doesn't do anything different than any other use of a graphics card.

And I've said this countless times, this is and will always be false.

Cards that were mined on had their memory overclocked to hell at voltages out of spec and have been running like that 24/7 for months or years. That is a very different use case compared to a card that has been used to game on.

 

[pf100]

This whole "mined GPUs are risky" thing is bitterness from people who didn't mine.

Gddr6x runs quite hot to begin with, and since mining cards were run 24/7 with the vram overclocked with a decent percentage of them running close to, or at, 110c where it starts to degrade beyond that, which is close to the self-destruct temperature of 120c, I don't see how you can say it's not risky. With that in mind, I bought a used mining 3080 last october for $450 from a highly rated seller on ebay fully prepared to return it if anything didn't seem right. As soon as I got it I ran stress tests on it and the vram stayed under 90c no matter how hard I tortured it so the guy took precautions, especially since it's a dell 3080 which are actually great cards if you use the thermal paste trick to keep the vram cool which the guy did, and the vram runs extremely hot if you don't, so he took care of it. So if you practice due diligence you can get a great used mining card for cheap, but there's no way in hell you can say it's not risky.

 

[DeeJay1001]

And I've said this countless times, this is and will always be false.

Cards that were mined on had their memory overclocked to hell at voltages out of spec and have been running like that 24/7 for months or years. That is a very different use case compared to a card that has been used to game on.

Contrary to what many seem to believe, electrical components do not have feelings, they dont protest going to work, and they dont get tired. These components have a rated service temperature range, and a rated life within that range. If you dont run them outside of those ranges it is fine. I dont know of any miners at least on the hobbyist level that pushed their hardware to the limits. Uptime was king, nobody wanted to be constantly fiddling with unstable overclocks or configs. Every miner out there was willing to and did trade off a tiny bit of hashrate for stability.

As another user said "This whole "mined GPUs are risky" thing is bitterness from people who didn't mine." Your bitterness is showing.

 

[pf100]

As another user said "This whole "mined GPUs are risky" thing is bitterness from people who didn't mine." Your bitterness is showing.

The article that this thread is about says that miners are painting gddr6x chips because they've turned yellow from overheating but you seem to be ignoring that.

 

[DeeJay1001]

The article that this thread is about says that miners are painting gddr6x chips because they've turned yellow from overheating but you seem to be ignoring that.

Are the chips non-functional or degraded in anyway? My statement can and was meant to apply to the original post as well.

 

[Chris34]

"Great bargain! Like new, used 24/7 for only 2 years"

 

[Broken Processor]

You need to learn how to buy second hand stuff. It's not something for any novice, but you can always ask someone to help you test the card in person or if buying from Ebay you are pretty much covered by them. Also warranty is transferable in most places. So unless you can afford to buy new, learn to buy second hand or opened box/resealed items.

How on earth do you tell if a card from eBay has had a paint job? Or try going to someone's house who's advert you saw on Craigslist and ask them to take the cooler off to inspect the ram and gpu.
In 30 year selling I've never been asked or wanted to see the chips but if asked to see working and tested before purchase I am happy to.

 

[pf100]

Are the chips non-functional or degraded in anyway? My statement can and was meant to apply to the original post as well.

It seems to me that you seem to think that chips that are yellow from overheating can't possibly be degraded or non-functional. I know that some of these cards have had vram at 110c 24/7 for a long time because that's where they throttle. I've seen videos of miners who ran them like that so I've seen it with my own eyes. 120c is the temperature where they self destruct. And you're telling me that a chip that has been within 10 degrees of death and painted to look not-yellow are somehow perfectly fine. There's some reason that you're trying to convince everyone that there's nothing to see here, and I don't care what that reason is because I know better.

 

[Gmr_Chick]

Are the chips non-functional or degraded in anyway? My statement can and was meant to apply to the original post as well.

Direct quote from the article:

When GPU components, such as the die or GDDR memory, overheat, they can produce visual signs of damage, such as discoloration or melting.

I'd say that pretty much means the GPU die itself was degrading because it was turning yellow. If it wasn't degrading (turning yellow) the miners wouldn't be trying to repaint them.