Bitcoin Forum

They now claim they will not honor RMAs for cards utilized by miners.
https://www.pny.com/File%20Library/Support/PNY%20Products/Warranties/GeForce%20Graphics/3-Year-Limited-Warranty.pdf

"THIS WARRANTY SHALL NOT APPLY WHERE PRODUCT(S) ARE USED TO ANY DEGREE, OUTSIDE OF NORMAL INTENDED
USE, WHICH SHALL INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO “MINING” (e.g., Cryptocurrency, Data Mining, Mining Farms). "


Might just return all my PNY cards that are within window.

Have any other companies made "Cryptocurrency Mining" a No go for their warranty?


*Here is a quick video regarding manufacturers and miners relation with inputs from the manufacturer companies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_oHQPWRWnQ&feature=youtu.be

How they detect its been used for mining?

Seems unless you have bios modded or hardware modded the cards they'd be pretty hard pressed to say/prove it was used as such.  Also many states/countries have pretty tough laws around modifying warranty terms and what doesn't void a warranty.  At least for cars in the USA technically modifying your car still doesn't void it's warranty, i'd think there's an extrapolation to be made to other warranties from that too.

They can't really. They would only be able to see the physical damage on the card, and diagnose the use-case accordingly.. Not the information that was ran through it.

The only way is if you label it used as such by buying one their repackaged mining GPU's. Probably best to avoid them anyways.

The funny thing is Mining in todays world is nothing like the old days, but it is just to scare off noobs.
All the noobs getting in will screw up a card and send it in and say some shit like oh I was mining, then PNY will tell em to get lost.

PNY never has been a very clever brand... There are absolutely no increased risks when mining when compared to gaming. They will probably lose some customers, and I wish them so, because such behaviours give bad image of crypto-currencies...

On the other hand, you have smart brands like Sapphire or ASRock who are creating products dedicated to crypto-mining.

And given you down your voltage, and keep optimal temperatures, that's not really a toll on the card. But as the other guy mentioned, a lot of new miners will OC their cards 110% Power, and run 90c all day as long as they are making money now, then rma it once it's broke or profits sink.

PNY sucks anyways and their warranty is mostly garbage.

There was a time that I used to buy PNY products but after several bad warranty experiences from near a decade ago now, I'll never buy another one of their products.

Even this might not be a very hard load on the card. They are designed to hold the worst. For exemple, I have a gaming computer, which I have since 2012, and when I play the card reaches easily 95°C, but yet I never had any problem with it. PNY just does not want to bother with problems coming from the bad quality of its products.

Well damn... but I don't see how they would know it was for mining.

The BIOS just needs to check if any of the standard mining algorithms were executed on the GPU, such as SHA256, Equihash, Ethash, etc., and if such an algorithm is detected over a sustained period of time, then trigger an e-fuse to mark the GPU as warranty-voided.

THAT easy? We're all doomed

Don't give them ideas !  :-X

Kind of hard to check a bios on a fried GPU don't ya think?

and if the card was just starting to artifact then people would completely fry it so they can't check the E-fuse.  In that case it would be self-defeating as they couldn't just swap out some caps, memory controller etc and resale as refurbished anymore.

Does PNY even make any AMD chipsets? Never really saw this brand locally.

I think they only do NVIDIA, and those you never flash the bios.

The way they can tell that you were a miner is simply by looking at your receipt that you need to hand in when you submit an RMA. If they see that you bought 10-20 GPUs, then they can easily say you were a miner.

If you bought 2 GPUs then they can't do anything.

PNY used to make AMD cards - I had one of their TI4600 (not HD 4xxx, the PRE HD-series from many years back) cards.

 I don't know if they still do, as their quality has dropped over the years and I stopped paying attention to them.

Im not a NVIDIA owner so I don't know how it works but I am pretty sure no NVIDIA miners flash their bios.

You are correct. Nvidia cards do not have a dual bios so their is some more risk involved VS AMD cards.

There is also a lack of a good database regarding succesful stable mining straps on flashed nvidia cards, so it seems like risky business to me.

Fuck em, no one uses trash PNY GPU's anyway.

Not like it matters, its super easy to get 30 mhs out of a 1070 anyway. Just increase mem clock to like +700 or whatever the card can handle. So much easier than trash AMD cards.

Thank you based Nvidia.

I would hope so if I paid almost twice the price of a 570. Sounds like you're trying to justify your purchase because all the AMD cards were out of stock. Or you couldn't figure out how to flash a bios and get 29 Mh/s stable.

Uh dude I sold all my RX cards for $400+ on ebay each and bought 1070's for less than $400 each. This was as soon as the RX Dag issue info came out. Sorry you got stuck with those RX cards.

For those of us business savvy we made out like bandits off of idiots buying RX cards at a huge markup. I run a store (TRS also) on eBay reselling so fees were hardly an issue.

Like I said, "AMD trash"

Every thread you are bashing AMD. Give it up already. We get you 'AMD is crap, NVIDIA rules!'

Lets get back on topic here.

Incorrect.  Palit 3-slots cards have dual Bios.
And yes you can flash (not edit) Bios from premium higher clocked models to cheaper models.

I responded to the guy as applicable..... id say you should get back on topic. I dont hate AMD but they have been this mediocre underdog ever since core 2 came out from Intel and im sick of it.

It's actually trivial.  You can read a BIOS e-fuse with a JTAG even if the card is completely bricked.  The following is a generic one, but all the GPU vendors have their own they don't sell to the public: https://www.amazon.com/Flashcat-Memory-Programmer-SERIAL-software/dp/B00F2P9AS6

An e-fuse is an electronic-fuse, it isn't a real fuse.  It can be reset with a JTAG too.

If they really want to know if it was used for mining they can , the question is ... it i really worth them it for them to do this for each n every card