Bitcoin Forum

How long do video cards live?I just started so im curious as its hard to find this info out

They will last for years if you are keeping the dust off them and the temps low

I have been doing it for about 6months with a 8gpu rig and no issues so far. Running 24/7 and 100% all the time. My temps are around 60c on gpu

anyone else been doing this for 2-3 years? any old school miners here? I would like to hear how video cards do under this environment.

I had radeon 7950s running for over 3 years.
Most of them had no issues, I only had to change fans on a few.

Sold them some time ago though.

I sold off my asus dc2 290x's to buy newer cards like half a year ago but before that they mined on and off for around 2 years total. The cores went from overclock to underclock with time and changing efficiency, at first they ran at 80c but in the end were chilling around mid 50's IIRC. Half of them had some type of fan failure, some fans completely dead, some only ran at high speeds. None of the cards died but I did have to pull back the memory OC by a couple hundred over time.

From my experience, you can expect a new piece of good quality hardware to run around 2-3 years. None of those cards died but I had some dead 380x's and 295x's, lots of dead 775 socket motherboards and hdd's.

The longest running piece of mining equipment died just last week, it was my treasured Samsung 710n that I dragged around the farm and used to install OS's and troubleshoot broken things. It now only displays a digital snowstorm, for winter has come to claim it and its time to rest, farewell my friend!

I have run a few of my rig almost 3 years, and the other rig 1-2 years. And also I have a new gen about 3-6 month running. The most important thing to keep your rig always in a good condition is giving them enough electrical power and regular maintenance also.

Electrical Power
Always calculate your card on the max power they need (TDP), more space safer. Also, we need to know about power, how much PCIe power can produce by PCIe 1x/16x on the motherboard. How much power can produce by MOLEX, SATA, PCIe 6, PCIe 6+2..etc.

Regular Maintenance
It is something to do in 2 weeks or a month. Check every cable rig, clean your rig from dust, if needed replace the thermal paste (can do it in a more long time period).

FYI: Am using R9 and RX series

Two of my RX 480 reference model GPU's died after 1.5 yr of mining operations they have only single fans and a way hotter than other, been lucky to get RMA on the first card, however the second card might be a challenge as I can't find my warranty receipts already.  :(

Usually the GPU themselves last forever but most likely the fans will break first or due to human error they will get damaged.

When changing fans you apply pressure to the heat sink which applies pressure to the ASIC chip and can cause solder balls to crack. Same if you try and change thermal paste on an old GPU and it's stuck on.

My oldest GPUs are still mining 24/7 since 2,5 years, with no issues.
My miners are with Ubuntu and sometime they runs without reboot from my part during 2 months.

But :
1) I use only nVidia GPUs (AMD suck in quality terms : too hot, too high power consumption, too noisy, a lot of issues...) : previous and current generation.
2) I use my GPUs at low power consumption (but I overclock at the maximum for this power consumption), not allways the the lowest, but the best ratio hashrate/power consumption.

I think my experience is not a good average of the mining world, but it is just to told that it is possible.

my oldest AMDs are2.5-3 years old, with 0 issue, they had been through a lot.
480 series are 1.5 old or so, they also had seen some rough times, but out of 600 only 2 had issues that I couldn't fix, no one could

I have a rig of old Powercolour HD6990s from 2011-2012 that are still running on cryptonight.

With regular maintainance, ie replacing fans, repasting heatsinks etc there is very little reason why they'd ever wear out. The issue becomes profitability after a while.

I have a few 7990 mining since 2013. I undervolt them and only run at about 60% power limit.

I have been keeping my cards at 100% power for both my water cooled 1080ti and my 1070


the water cooled 1080ti sits at 57 c and the 1070 at 65c

am I doing it wrong by leaving them at %100 power? (everything else hasnt been touched except custom fan speed with temp)

are you all lowering your power levels to make the cards last longer?

Personally, I only start undervolting, reducing power etc if there is an issue with temps. I occasionally go over the RAM chips if they're visible and read temps from them with an ir thermometer, if they read more than slightly higher than the main readings from the gpu, I add whatever heatsinks I can find that'll fit (sometimes I bend bits of copper sheeting to link up to the main heatsink) and that seems to do the trick for me on older cards. I'm doing the same with my newer cards in the hope that it'll keep them running for just as long.

Bought 3 x R9 290x on 28.01.2014. 1 sold long ago. 2 Still running 24/7 @ 90°C.
For 1 year I stopped mining because it was not profitable.

So totally runtime is about 3 years without any issue.

R9 290x was a good card instead of the new cheap RX serie...
Already broke about 20%? of my RX470/570/.....

30/08/2016
SAPPHIRE AMD RADEON NITRO+ RX 470 8G GDDR5 PCI-E DUAL HDMI / DVI-D / DUAL DP OC W/BP (UEFI)

mod bios, i use now claymore for mine eth in solo mod, make 28.1 mh/s.

I think 3 years minimum we have for nvidia cards

They will last for years if you are keeping the dust off them and the temps low)

Mine have also been running for over 6 months 24/7 with no issues so far. I always keep temps below 70 and the dust buildup hasn't been too bad.

thank you for the statistics!
my oldest GPUs are from July 2017 and so far so good, all of them are gtx 1070 / gtx 1080ti cards
only one fan has failed, knocking on the wood as well.

Ive had two aftermarket rx480 fail after a month or so....Maybe bad luck, temps were ok. Unfortunately they wouldnt replace them because they were discontinued.

Hoping my vegas will last years, it seems reference pcb is pretty well made imo.

/J

i am mining 24/7 till last may, and no problem, i will like to stay in this way  8)

Who wouldn't replace them?  Retail or Manufacturer? There is way more than a month of manufacturer warranty on those cards, so something should have been done.

I am not do that . just mining 12/24 hour of a day. for safe

I have been mining for 7 months with Nvidia cards, no issues encountered. I keep the temp around 50°, mild overclocking.

Could you please say what is a low temparature?

0 is pretty low.

:-) Negative is even better but that's called a fridge, not a GPU :)

I am mining with rx 580 for 5 month and like it very much, never ever had any problem + has a great hashrate. They are 24/7 but now I think what to do, seems these cards are very expensive as for now and hard to buy. Give them a rest daily for 1-2 hour or weekly one day? Don't want to lose hashrate too (as I have heared as time passes, gpu's lost small hashrate, for example from 29 to 28.5 and etc).

Nobody can tell you when a specific unit will fail, but there are tips that will generally extend the life of your hardware.

Keep core temps low (subjective, but generally below 80C for 24/7 operation. Although some have stories of running cards at core temps near 90-100C, none of them would truly recommend that practice in general). Do note that you generally have diminishing returns on this (for example, cooling from 60C to 55C probably offers smaller lifetime benefits than 80C down to 75C).

Avoid unnecessary strain on the fans (no need to run fans at 100% just to get below 60C, or whatever). Use cheap box fans to supplement, but avoid causing turbulence with the integrated fans. Also remove dust buildups as-needed (varies based on the air quality of your mining location)

Avoid excessive overclocking. For example, excessive memory overclocks can cause artifacting, which is a symptom of an unstable overclock that may cause permanent damage, and this symptom might not be noticed without having a display connected to each graphics card.

Use a quality PSU. A PSU made by a reputable OEM (particularly Seasonic, FSP, SuperFlower, and some others) generally has a better chance of consistently providing clean power to your cards, rather than flaky no-name PSUs which may have more irregularities.

I have 7700 and 7800 series cards from 2012 that still work fine today (used for mining from mid-2012 to early-2015, then fired up again in 2017.). A good friend of mine still has some 5000 series cards from 2010 that are still operational (but not actually used for mining anymore).

Thanks for the info; Very usefull. They run currently at 75 degrees and I have additional fans installed. So I guess it should be fine like that).