Bitcoin Forum

Us miners smack the crap out of our hardware, pounding the video cards for weeks at a time. Here are some to
tips to maintain the health and lifespan of your hardware:

1) Take periodic breaks for mining. Perhaps every hour in 12 should be "down time" with no mining.
2) Try and keep the room extra cool, perhaps put a fridge in the mining room with the door open
3) Provide your card with warm up and warm downs, gradually lowering GPU speeds
4) Avoid getting foodstuff, jam etc, in your hardware. Same goes for drinks
5) Cigarette smoke has been shown to damage fan parts - don't smoke fags near your PC if you care!
6) Take the occasional weekend off, only playing minesweeper to calm your video card.

Anyone gots any more tips I'll be glad to add them to the list.

Refrigerators are not magical cold-making boxes, they're heat exchangers. Any heat they remove from their contents is expelled through the coils on the back of the fridge. Given that this is also less than 100% efficient, an open-doored refrigerator adds more heat to a room than it removes.

Honestly people, L2Physics

Most of these tips are bogus. In fact there are arguments that hardware is happier when it can "settle" into a consistent routine, a single constant(ish) temperature and run speed becomes easier on physical parts than spin-ups and spin-downs. I'd say that not getting food and drinks into your hardware is kind of a no-brainer?

I'm just going to go ahead and assume the fridge was a joke.

I think the OP was joking...

Funny how it keeps my beers cool then smartass!

1) No, this will shorten the life of your hardware.  Consistent = better.
2) A fridge open in the room will do nothing but ruin the fridge compressor.  They are not made to be cooling 24/7, and all of the heat extracted from the cool air comes off the cooling coils in the back, so it won't make the room any cooler.  In fact, it will make the room hotter, since you are dumping more electricity into it.
3) This will do nothing.
4) Duh.
5) Duh.
6) No - see 1.

I get that, but I hear the "fridge as air conditioner" thing a lot and it admittedly gets me a bit militant at this point  ;D

Heating PC components up then cooling them down regularly is worse than leaving them at a constant temperature all the time.

Where did this theory come from? Dude, resting your hardware is the best thing for its health.
Spin that bitch down and reap the rewards.

Could just put the PC in the fridge but then you would need something to prevent the condensation.
Such as a damp rid or de-humidifier.

Or in my case I can just leave my door open since out side its 3C and my rooms not much better at 8C

Mining = my heater.

Thats good thinking. Maybe put the PC in a sealed plastic bag and then in the freezer.

Yea add a bit of condensation to the mix then remove it from freezer and fire it up.

Good joke :D

In line with the kind of "tips", I'd suggest
7) Warm up your PC before starting each new mining run to avoid injuries to the GPU, suggest taking a 5 mile jog with it, keyboard and mouse optional

I might recommend some PPE for your miners while they are hard at work.. (PPE - Personal Protection Equipment)

- Since the miners environment is often dusty, the use of a respirator, dust mask or other type of filter media is advisable.

- The miner's environment is also often very dimly lit. To avoid accidents and improve productivity, ample lighting is suggested.

- Finally, the more congested the work environment gets with many miners crammed into small spaces, many find the use of a steady supply of cool water often helps miners stay as productive as possible, despite deplorable work conditions.

A lot of these suggestions promote thermal stress.

8. Take time to talk with your rig. Developing a close working relationship will increase your hashrate as well as decrease the likelihood of your rig stealing your BTC and spending it on silk road drugs to solve its problems.

This made me laugh so much. Thermal stress issues aside #5 is probably the only usefull advice some smokers don't think about what it can do to other things in their enviroment.

My cards are my bitches. I run them flat out 24/7. And they know not to complain about it because if they do, I will only crank up the voltage and clocks more, and maybe blow a little smoke through their intakes. So they keep quite and do my bidding. I expect this relationship to last for some time.    8)

You are the best troll I've read all week!  :D

Trying to lower the difficulty rating??

One of those insulated bags would be better.  I think the large ones are under $10 USD

Nah, best troll of the week goes to the guy who claimed to encode (presumably) child porn into the  block chain, and was going to turn us all in to the authorities for trafficking:

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=11381.0

If it keeps the condensation out it would also keep the heat in which makes it pointless.
A damp rid would be the best thing to use but it would only last 2-3 days before its soaked up as much as it can.
De-humidifier would be next best but it would be adding to the heat.

Watercooling and sticking the radiator in the fridge/freezer would be most cost effective tho.

+1

i find sending my cards to the Bahamas for a week a month makes them work harder

+1  ;D

+1 LOL I like how you think

+1

My wife laughs when I say, "I have to go check on my bitches real quick."

Go away troll...

#9. Your mining rig will not talk. In the event that your mining rig does talk, I urge you to disregard its advice.

trololololoollol

0) Stop mining.  Put all those cards back into their boxes and stackem on a bookshelf.  You will have a long lasting "library" of cards that should outlast you and can be passed down to your heirs.

Some new warning signs on the tobacco pouch:

"Smoking harms you and your Bitcoin mining equipment"

"Smoking drastically reduces your MH/s"

"Smoking kills. Your miners. Then you."

Oh yeah, now I need to think about it. Time for a cigarette.

And BTW, funny idea of the OP about the fridge. Judging from the name and the look, he's probably done it too much in his life. Close the fkin door, idiot!!!

I like putting foodstuff in drinks, in particular I like putting ice cream in root beer.  YUMMM

Why should I avoid it and what does that have to do with keeping my rigs healthy?

Hahaha this did tickle me :D My advice would be avoid the OP like the plague. It did make me wonder what the motivation for this post was ? Then it hit me !! Sticky substances in your cards ? smoking and fridges !! Sounds more like what I do after a bit of sex. Do my buisness, light a fag and grab a beer. That poor mining machine !! So I'm starting a small charity for the Protection of Rigs against Insane Careless Kids or as I like to call it PRICK.

There are hundreds of poor mining rigs out there that are abused every day by kids all over the world !!

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnfxhfMvwP1qki5xfo1_500.jpg
Mining rigs forced to work, exhausted by their cruel owner

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2552/3681167777_e4e4609c4d.jpg
Look how sad they are !!

If you could spare a coin to the PRICK fund we as a collective can stand up and say no more and give these guys a happy life !!

7) Play music to your rigs.  Mozart slows down the mining rate, Wagner speeds it up.

That's some pretty harrowing imagery. Finally, it's good to see some intelligent posts up in this thread too, seems
 so far there's just been cranks and kids posting shit.

All them posts about "don't rest your card because of thermal stress" are talking nonsense. It's 100% straight up FACT
that resting your card will ease bearing tension in the fan and prolong silicon substrate integrity.

Probably worthhwile keeping strong magnetic fields at bay too, so don't get your speakers too near your rig. With respect
to that guys that said something about Motzart slowing hashrate, that's pretty hard to believe man.

I dunno, they don't look exhausted enough to me... needs more vents and fans

Ok ok so it was a bad pun :D

"cigarette smokes are shown to damage fan parts"? is this true?

6 months worth of smoking
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=137197

The problem is the tar and moisture (from the human's breath) in the "smoke", it sticks and starts to coat stuff especially fans and the parts the airflow is most strongly directed at. Then dust/fur/lint gets stuck to this "glue", basically making it worse.

Yeah, when i worked at a PC repair shop years ago working on PC's that came from a smokers house was just nasty as fuck...everything was yellowed and sticky with nastiness.  Would charge extra for having to clean it up before working on it.

You realize he was being sarcastic.... right?
You have no idea what you're talking about. Especially the refrigerator stuff. Go read every so often instead of posting on the internet.

You want to know why those magical machines keeps beer cold when they're inside? Because it evaporates liquid in order to keep the things inside of it cold. Do you know how you evaporate liquid? A baby knows how - you heat it up. Now ask yourself where does that heat go after its done cooling your beer? Into the room the refrigerator is located. So you can be extremely stupid, keep the refrigator open, and actually be ADDING heat to the room... OR you could remove the refrigerator from the room all together and thus be removing heat from the room.

Your idea of keeping the door to the refrigerator open to cool off a room is almost as bad as the idea of building a computer and putting it in a refrigerator to keep it cool.

The more posts this guy makes, the more I believe that is his real picture, not an Avatar.

LOL

Why rest? It's hardware, not a human brain. Constant voltage is healthier because a PSU with shifting loads will be more prone to voltage spikes. Still unlikely, but resting a video card is bogus.

It's for the same reason you'd rather buy a car with 150,000 miles that's used only for long-distance highway driving than buying a car with 75,000 miles that's only used for city driving with lots of stops and starts.  When fast-moving parts constantly adjust speed and temperature, things move out of place and materials suffer weaknesses due to frequent changes in temperature.

I'd be more worried about replacing the thermal paste then resting the hardware. But that's me.

Oh MAN. I LOLd sooooo hard reading this thread.

I'm not sure if hes trolling or just plain stupid.

Well, this videocard is two years old now and is still kicking ass!

Also, the compressors are designed to run for about 5 minutes at a time, leaving the door open is a fast way to destroy a refrigerator

I'm getting pretty sick of all the pseudo-science and fridge-based conspiracy theories up in the thread! You kooks need
to read a book and undertand before posting all this buffoonary!

Of course fridges *work* - they make shit cool, it's obvious, just open one up! Do you think because a PC isn't made of beer a fridge wont
cool it? Of course it will! The reason a fridge removes heat is because the excess forms drag on the electricity used to run it. Essentially
heat is removed from the server room via the electricity supply cable.

I made this thread in good faith to educate you people in the way of card health. If you can't be civil and praise my shit then I suggest you
keep quiet and don't come crying to me when your cards pop due to ill health!

What is this gibberish? This analogy makes no sense! A PC is nothing like a car, it doesn't even look like one! Its like
comparing chalk and cheese.

Lol.  I gave you the context of the analogy -- moving parts and temperature, not appearance.  A PC is like a car in that it has moving parts and temperature variation.  Chalk and cheese don't have moving parts and melted cheese is just awesome.

This thread wins Lowest Content Value by far.

Oh, I'm sure we can achieve lower.

You're not even trying now. There's a saying in my country. If one person tells you you're stupid, they might be crazy. If two people say you're stupid, it might be their opinion. But hey, if EVERYONE tells you you are stupid, you should really look into it.

Btw, I think your advices are stupid, and you are intellectually incapable of understanding thermodynamics. Do us a service and "rest" your video card forever and don't post crap on this forum.

Fucking freezers, how do they work?

Worst troll ever, there isn't anyone who is really that stupid. Even a cursory glance at the Wikipedia page about refrigerator would disprove that and even idiots who don't know anything look things up when faced with overwhelming opposition. I think this guy needs a ban.

Ahahahahaha!@

Look man, this was a beautiful thread before you and your misinformed brutes came along and made ugly. Y'all need
to learn to be more polite and shit.

With regards to the fridge, you got to understand that it ain't a closed system. There's energy being supplied by the
the power station outside right? That energy lost by cooling the fridge down, entropy is transferred out of the room by
the electrons. Seeing as y'all can't provide no robust refutation other than point to wikipedia etc I think we gonna
have to agree to disagree up in here.

Hey but no hard feelings. I'd like to 0ffer another great tip:
8 ) keep your machine clean inside, dust and cobwebs will reduce heat extraction efficency

Straight up it's true! That tar and shit from the ciggie will build up into deposits and clag up all the internals.
That'll prevent heat extraction and slow down electron flow. Your machine will either overheat or you'll get
timing error crashes.

Pretty much all goes with life philosophy, if you lead a unhealthy life that gonna reflect in the things around you.
So save your lungs and Bitcoins will be your reward!

Entropy transferred out of the room?  WTF does that mean?  The room is a preservative and the rest of the world begins to grow mold?

Maybe you meant energy transferred out of the room.  But my room has fucking walls.  What does your room have?  Doilies?

And where does the heat from the food go?  Does it stay inside the fridge?  Maybe the cool inside the fridge is so dense that the heat just kind of creeps around it like a psycho ex-girlfriend.

Please explain how the electrons from the freezer take heat from the room while the electrons on a spaceheater heat up the room.

Yet an other person saying the OP's info was off.  Keeping GPU's constantly on isn't as bad as turning it on and off frequently.  What happens is when used solder points and such expand due to heat when shut off and cooled down it contracts due to cooling off.  Enough expanding and contracting can and will eventually break the card.

I didn't bother looking, but either Wikipedia has got the tech completely wrong, or it's being misinterpreted.

If your willing to listen for a moment, I'm a licensed a/c tech, and a/c and fridges work on the same basic principals, with the exception that an a/c unit is designed to run nearly 100% duty cycle. Refrigerators and freezers however, are designed with 25-30% duty cycle in mind. If you try to use a refrigerator system to cool a PC (generating heat constantly) you will burn it out eventually. Window a/c units and similar can be converted to cool PC components, but specialized tools and equipment is required to perform the required modifications.

These systems remove the heat from one area, and need to dissipate them in another. A/c units use things like radiators on both ends, evaporator is where it gets cold, condenser is where it gets hot. Then they simply use air to transfer the heat either into the system or out of the system. The only electricity involved is to run the fans and refrigerant compressor. In fridges, the same principal applies, although the evaporator is smaller and inside the fridge, usually does not have a fan on it. The condenser is the black grid of tubing you see on the back of a fridge. That warms up, and the inside gets cold. No thermal energy ever leaves the room via the electrical wire. There's a bit more going on in the refrigerant system all dependent on the system pressure differences, but this is a reasonably easy to understand run down of the basics.

Even the use of a peltier cooler (ceramic, thermo-electric device) the electricity is used to facilitate transfer of heat from one side to the other, and in fact these devices create more heat than they are able to remove from the cool side.

Overclock.net forums have a number of great articles of people using refrigerant or peltier based cooling on PC's if your interested in learning more.
http://www.overclock.net/



I don't think anyone's trying to dump on your thread, it's just best if we try and prevent misinformation whenever possible.

Damn, you spoiled the fun of watching him try to come up with crazy explanations for his absurd claims DX<

Heh :p when it's something your trained to know, it's hard to watch someone try and explain it like that

Oh I think they are... they are dumping on a troll thread... but your post reminded of this:

Many years ago I happened upon a person who was running a render farm in his garage... It was pretty warm in there and his solution was to put 4 window AC units in to keep it cool. The problem is they were literally sitting in the garage... the condenser end was venting into the garage... I kept trying to explain this too him... but he honestly believed it was working... unlike the OP who is a top quality troll :D

 

That's good thinking man, you one of them few openminded individuals that keep the world from going crusty! Ignore all them other
so called experts, they just parroting them nonsense that got jammed into their heads from the Man.

You're right in that a spaceheater is pretty much an inverse freezer. Both take energy from an external source to function. But where as the
freezer transfers entropy out of the room, a heater will transfer entropy into the room. Both convert energy doing this, so all conservation principles
are intact. It is the heating fins on a freezer that achieve this inversion and such fins do warm up, but in general more cool remains
in the room.

That maths behind this is solid. Sorry to all you so called a/c experts, but your knowledge is bunk. Stop poncing around like you know shit,
if you can't prove it from first principles, then keep your cake hole closed!

I'm sorry to all you good folk out that have been PMing me about card health tips, this thread seems to have been hijacked by a bunch of crazies and
conspiracy nuts. There is one other important factor that y'all should take into account when caring for your card and
that is magnetic fields.

I mentioned it earlier, before all the heathens turned up, and I'm saying again: don't put yor speakers near your cards!

The magnetic fields in the speakers cause vortexing in electron flows that are in your PC. So keep them speakers at arms length
as you get down to whatever disco music you listen to while mining.

Ohhhhhh I get it now!  I didn't check me maths!

sigh.. goes to show ya I guess.. You just cant fix stupid

trololol
the pic matches

You just said they do, but not how; what i asked is how.

Awww, man, this is one zombie thread that shoulda stayed in the grave! I keep hoping it will go away, but it...just...won't...die. Someone bust out the holy water, please.  :P

:) Smalleyeter - nice posting yet again, but I might ruin it.

For most casual GPU users, the cards run happily for a long time.  However, they do fail and there are several things that shorten lives.  I'd agree with the smoke, but I don't have that problem.

1: Keep things clean.  Dust is well know for doing amazing things and gets everywhere.  Clean your case/fans/cards periodically.
2: Heat kills - if you overclock, you will probably shorten the life of the card, and it doesn't take too much to fry video ram or the gpu.  I'm happy running stock speeds and down clocked memory.
3: Have spares.  I have been running cards 24/7 longer than bitcoin has been around, and every now and then I get a bearing failure on a fan.  I have a stash of failed cards so I can swap out a fan and replace it easily.  I also "re-fresh" the thermal paste rather than applying new - saves me quite a bit.

If I wanted to have my computers get cold, I can turn them off, but they are happier when warm.

I feel bad contributing to this thread but I just wanted to comment on a couple things.  Computers in fridges don't work.  First, as has been mentioned, they aren't designed to run constantly.  Second, the compressors in fridges aren't all that powerful, so you it won't be keeping your rig very cool even before the compressor fails.  A/C units or dehumidifiers will work better.

Ah this thread again...

yea been looking for a good laugh and some of the more recent replies to the OP have delivered.  ;D

I'm getting quite a few good tips through PMs now from many of you good folk sharing your ideas on card longevity. But one tip in particular
caught my eye, that is the use of a hairdryier and a bucket of ice.

If you point the hairdryer at your PC and get it to blow over ice it will indeed produce a cool stream of air. Yes, this cold air can
be used to cool your video card. However, excess water vapour in the air may fry your shit, so it isn't advisable. It would
only work if the ice is kept in a sealed plastic bag.

Keep them tips coming fellow miners. Just ignore all the haters and crazies.