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Avoid used sapphire GPUs, I don't know how this GPUs are made but they die easily after few years , this have happened to me with GPUs like Vega 56, rx580s and 570s, stay away from sapphire cards

Actually i like sapphire they are best in AMD gpus. I have many of sapphire being working since 2017 i got used sapphires cleaned changed thermal paste some raplaced fans working 7/24 since 2020 i thought they can die but doing great. Another good thing with sapphire is they always uses fuses so it protects pcb from burn. Unlike other venders you can find many burnt pcbs.

What about Zotac? I have a gtx1660 super brand new that's not working anymore, fans run very slow when booting up but no display and I can't even identify the fuse on the GPU because I don't know what they look like, any link to where I can know what GPU fuses looks like?

from what i've heard, sapphire is one of the best vendor for amd gpus out there. have you ever rma your devices or find out why your gpu dies? it might be related to something else, such as bad psu and so on.

zotac is a tier 2/3 vendor. it belongs to the same class as colorful afaik. temp is definitely the mian issue for gpu issued by them.

Can you share more info?
About the model and what's the issue with these cards

I had some Sapphire GPUs and they were pretty good, probably the best AMD partner in my opinion, specially the Nitro++ models, good and reliable fans, replaceable on some models, easy to clean
Even the entry models like Pulse are good

Only good experiences with sapphire here, the only downside in my country is the 1 year warranty vs 3 years with Asus or Gigabyte (only talking about AMD cards)

I have 5 zotac GPU gtx1660 super and Ti, they are so cool when mining their temp is around 56°C at 31MH each so I believe the maker did a good job on the temp unlike bad manufacturers like maxsun and veinda

Zotac improved a lot over the years.
I have 12x3080 amp holo and they are rock solid.

Sapphire GPUs are top of the line in most models.  Well built, durable double bearing fans, good cooling, etc.  Sure some may need to be RMA'd, but so do all the others.

Yes zotac is good I've been buying their cards since gtx1080ti amp and it's working perfectly till date, I have 12 gtx1660 super that are all zotac too they work very well, zotac isn't a joke

There is nothing wrong with sapphire GPUs unless you buy used which might have been used for years on mining already, you need to be careful when sourcing for used GPUs as many won't tell the truth about using them to mine for years

Both of them is Pc partner group,Amd side Sapphire, nvidia side Zotac, Inno3D, and Manli.Sapphire is one of the best amd partner.(for me Best) ;D

I dont have zotac but ive seen bad mini series, they have alot problems.
Fuse looks like this :
https://m.made-in-china.com/product/1206-Fast-Acting-Slow-Blow-Surface-Mount-Fuses-SMD-Fuse-904271565.html

Sapphire uses it is BIG +++ for them
Lately rtx3000 also have fuses many vendors now understood to put fuses :)

For me the  Sapphire are best in AMD gpus i own. Fans are perfect, good quality and robust designs.

You have bad luck or you push too much overclock on your cards, OVERCLOCK AND TEMPERATURE KILL GPUS EASY.

The only good thing about sapphire is the fan system, anything else is crap, friend bought a lot of sapphire gpus in 2016 and 88% died during those 5 years 2021 now, friend also bought a lot of asus, gigabyte and xfx and none died, only sapphire and most are nitro.

Avoid sapphire gpus, trust me, if the fan in the asus gigabyte or xfx die, you can always replace them with something else, is not hard. Not worth having sapphire gpus because of the fan system because they break 88% more than any other brand.

Of about 200 Sapphire reference design RX 470's, 60 died over 4 years of the exact same problem - vrm mosfets blowing, usually so badly they burn through the PCB.
I believe this was a model specific issue where they cheaped out with components, because I haven't had any other sapphires ever die on me.

I also had 50 Nitro+ and none of them died over 4 years.

Gigabyte and HIS had the worst fans in my experience that literally begin to fall off in less than 2 years, while Sapphire has the most durable.

Bad risers (caps bursting) did take down a few GPU's over the years, but aside from the sapphire reference models almost no GPU's have died on me ever.
Most of them are either DOA when purchased or they just run forever with the occasional fans falling off (I never push them too hard).

owned 100+ sapphire 470-480 from 2016 ,just one died ,all others still working without any problem,gigabyte and asus strix have the worst fans,sleeve bearings fans dies very quick, changed fans 2 times already with this brands. ;D.never problem with referance blower fans.

These are the only video cards that work for me for 5 years - rx480-470.
Sapphire made very good cooling for video cards.
I have already installed alternative cooling on other video cards.
Most likely you are out of luck or you bought a used video card.
And the new sapphires work great for me

I havent had any problems with Sapphire RX470-480 Nitro+ cards, ball bearings are the king.

Most of the cards use problematic sleeve bearings and those should be mounted vertically, like in tower case.

https://www.newark.com/pdfs/techarticles/mro/ballVsSleeve.pdf

But both fan types are usually easy to change or fix, or even change from sleeve to ball bearing, I did this on Gigabyte RX470.

https://cryptomining-blog.com/tag/sleeve-to-dual-ball-bearing-fans/

Worst fans i had were in XFX RX570 RS 8GB XXX Edition (Red fans), 6 months and the fans were dead, locked 60% speed.

I have Rx 570 and Rx 580 Sapphire Pulse which is not the top brand as the top is Nitro plus and they are still running fine mining Ethereum Classic right now.Probably it just happened to you as many think Sapphire is the best brand when it comes to AMD cards.

Actually last time I traveled down to China most mining farms I saw are using sapphire model of GPUs the most, maybe your friend bought those GPUs from miners who don't take much care of their GPUs? Or maybe your friend don't care much about the longetivy of the GPUs and start OC too much? I don't see anything wrong with sapphire

what is life of GPUs ?

I got a bunch of 580s that have been working since 2018 and recently switch them off due to space issue. I am thinking whether to sell them or to wait till I get space again for mining. How long these GPUs  can last?

There we have it, this shows that you care for those GPUs and they served you right, many just care about making dollars out of the GPUs and that is it, no dusting off the dusts that affects cooling, no thermal paste reapplying, no changing thermal pads, of cos the cards will fail faster if they aren't taken care of

All were brand new, maybe like somebody said, specific models, because my friend bought many of a specific model and where I live there is no warranty, so if it breaks then gameover. If warranty was given then no issues, so in many countries shops dont cover any warranty procedure, yes sapphire covers, but you need to send to usa and that costs a lot, more than the gpu itself, plus after it gets back from usa you also needs to pay tax on it hehe, so better leave it broken and be done with it.

https://i.ibb.co/2vz8LMh/GP.jpg (https://ibb.co/StkQ1my)
This is how 5 year old video cards work after mining Ethereum. This is the maximum possible downvolt and overclocking, I can add more megahash, but I need stability.
One of the video cards has been dying for six months already, but I picked up a stable BIOS for it. When overclocked, she starts having problems.
This is a sapphire, I changed the thermal paste once, 3 years after the end of the warranty. All coolers are original.

I would try to run those under 60C, usually they start to crash on 65C. Also you could try to drop mem to 2000 or 2030...
Using REF 20?

EDIT: Just checked, i'm running those with 1950 mem, 29,7Mh/s and temp 55C (Ubermix bios with REF 20)

Is 65°C that bad for AMD GPUs ? I think they are far more safer at that temp, I have a rx580 that runs on 70°C for years and it still working fine I had to give it out to my nephew and he still do casual gaming on the GPU

I have never heard someone have a problem with Sapphire's GPU, at least in my circle which most are typical end-user gamers or miners. Heck, when there was a clearance of used mining cards, Sapphire AMD is always the one best selling even if the price is a bit higher than other GPU brands.
And Vega 56, rx580s, and 570s are quite ancient so they're bound to failure since it is way past their prime condition. Let's me give some tips, PSU is the most critical part that you should not cheap out if you want to squeeze out whatever is left of those old GPU cards.

I think the problem usually is the memory temp, not the core, not sure if you can see it on polaris cards, maybe gpu-z?

And of course, it depends on the card, these are just my opinions on Sapphire RX480 Nitro+ cards with samsung memory.

Here is my experience with Sapphire cards.

The really really old GPUS before 2013, where very solid built. I am talking about the Sapphire Radeon 7950 etc. Then in 2014 they had a bad batch of GPUs. The worst was the Sapphire Dual-X R9 280X. This card had faulty MOSFETs or something. Basically after mining for a few weeks, they all went up in a poof of smoke.

I think the Sapphire Triple Fan R9 280X was more solid built. Anyways the issue I had with the Dual-X was that if you want to RMA you need to ship it overseas. And if you want to RMA you need proof you are the original owner. They require the original bill of sale along with your RMA. Since I bought them second hand, I couldn't RMA any of them and they were all less than a year old.

Since then I never bought any Sapphire cards however I think the RX series and up were more solid built and didn't really hear of any issues with them.

This is the normal temperature for these cards in the summer. Other cards worked for me in the summer at a temperature of 75 degrees Celsius, because there was poor ventilation in that room.
Despite the errors, the farm is very stable, so I don't want to do anything. I've tried different settings, but these are the most stable ones. It is better not to optimize old video cards, it can take a lot of time, but there will be no result.

Gigabyte and zotac has the worst cooling materials on them ( cheap thermal pads) while maxsun and yeston have worst cooling mechanism over all but Msi, Asus, sapphire and others are the first on my list, they never failed me, I'm shocked you said they die easily it depends on how the owner took care if the cards, no matter which brand if care is not taken the cards will die fast

They probably do that to void your warranty with them because they know you will change the crap thermal things and doing so, they will not do do with you, yeah shady business, my take on this is to look for manufactures who puts the best thermal pads, so you dont need to change anything.

I think this is not true. I have 4 year old Gigabyte and zotac graphics cards and they work great. Somewhere I changed some thermal seals, because they deteriorated when removing the cooling system.
Each model has its own problems and here you need to talk specifically. For example, I would not buy MSI MECH or Armor video cards, because this is the worst cooling, and I would buy GAMING with pleasure.

My Msi Mech are no where near the quality of my Msi Gaming.

I have some msi 5600 gaming that are likely the best of all my cards for cooling.


https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CKDLN91/ref=dp_iou_view_product?ie=UTF8&psc=1


these were great amd cards.

MSI Gaming has always been the best video card and cost $ 20-30 more. They overclocked well and were more popular with miners than Sapphire. But I have never seen a Sapphire with poor cooling, and this is a huge plus for this graphics card manufacturer. I would not be afraid to buy Sapphire with any cooling.

He is probably judging old zotac cards, zotac just learnt about their mistakes year ago there old GPU has worst cooling pads, I had to change the pads on my zotac 1660 super the pad melted on the chips and I found out they using cheap pads

If you having problems with sapphire cards then you got yours from miners who don't take much care of the cards, this is why I don't buy used cards randomly from different sellers, I always make sure I'm getting from people who use the cards for other means and also locally

Yeah the worst GPU fans are probably Gigabyte. I'd had most of my Gigabyte GPUs with failing or almost failing fans. I used to buy them on Aliexpress however those new ones also failed. They had a very bad design because some of their models featured 3 fans per GPU and even those fans started to all fail and they were all under low loads.

I got so bad that I either basically slapped on a few case fans to cool the GPUs or I just took some dental floss, put it on the fan blades, pulled off the fan to see the bearing and lubricated it from time to time. Did it so many times that I managed to do this while the GPU is inside the rig and mounted vertically. Re oiling the fans made them good for another 90-365 days.

I never had problems with Gigabyte fans,usually I had Gigabyte cards only in the Nvidia side mostly as I only have on Rx 5700 xt from the Amd side which is running pretty well.I had a lot of 1070,1070 ti,1060 and 1050 ti in my first mining rigs during 2016-2017 and I still have some of those cards,one Gtx 1050 ti running as my primary card in my workstation,mining perfectly Ethereum Classic with 58 degree Celsius and doing so from quite some time.I had problems only with the ASUS brand which may sound strange to many people here but a lot of Rx 580 with triple fan died to early.

On my experience as a pc technician, sapphire was only good for software applications but not really effective with mining because of its poor quality. Better switch to other expensive one that has good performance and most efficient. We can't force everybody to stop using it, but at least we're reminding them for their own benefit.

Every GPU makers have bad versions of GPUs, for example zotac have different versions of gtx1660, I have two types of the GPU same name same brand but different cooling method, one is good and one is bad, it's same with MSI cards, some are poorly build while some are better

And where did you get such statistics?
From your experience?
And how is the use of software applications different from mining, if, for example, I will use these video cards in software for guessing passwords?
A professional always speaks in detail about each device model, and does not say that all products are crap.

I'm not that professional about specific details and all those ideas I said based only on experiences. Technically for other applications like guessing something or deeper, I don't tackle any of those because I'm not into deeper applications. I'm more focused on hardware set-up and servicing that's why I gave my opinions related to Op's subject.

Man, don't be upset with me, but I'm an engineer too. If I tell my colleagues that sapphire is shit, I might get beat up :)
I can say that MSI Armor and MECH have poor cooling, Palit Dual has poor cooling, Asus OC also has poor cooling.
The shittiest OC I've written is Armor. I won't talk about gigabytes, because here we need to talk about models.

Gaming, mining, rendering, password guessing are different calculation algorithms for a video card, but I still don't understand why sapphire is only suitable for software applications?

Why are these graphics cards of poor quality? What's not to like: Cooling system, power system, thermal pads... etc?

If you share your experience, tell us specifically about the problem?

Unfortunately I also have a bad experience with the Sapphire RX480 8 GB Nitro models. Out of 24 of those cards, 4 pieces died for me. I maintained them regularly, blew them with a compressor, put the best thermal paste "Thermal grizzly kryonaut", I have a very high quality and reliable power supply. I am very disappointed. So I went back to MSI again. Now I only use the MSI 5700XT Gaming-X series graphics cards . I used to have several MSI 7950 Twin Frozr IIIs and have been mining with them for years. None of them ever died. Fans did go, but graphics cards never did.

And what is the reason? These video cards have a 3-year warranty. Did they break in the first 3 years or after?
Various models broke down for me, but I even got a profit from this, because the store returned the money to me.
I have a lot of Sapphire 5600 XT  and these GPUs are the best.

I have 6 Sapphire nitro plus - rx 580. Since 2017 up to now running ETH smoothly with any issue all BIOS mod
with 33.5Mh/s each card

How did they die on you exactly? Did something blow up OR did you just get a BSOD on bootup?

If you got the BSOD or they started to crash on cold start... I think I know what happened.

Most likely since you said you replaced the thermal paste, you might of pulled a little too hard when seperating from heatsink and created micro-cracks. At first you don't get issue because they are small. However on every heat cycle, the cracks get larger and larger. Eventually one day when you stop mining to do a reboot, it crashes all of a sudden or fails to boot or you get BSOD. Then you find out the GPU is dead.

I also killed a few of my GPUs this way. Now i never do the thermal paste job unless the GPU is less than a year old.

I didn't change the paste then. One piece died in operation and 3 pieces died after blowing with a compressor (I blew them regularly until then, every 3 months). All pieces died after the 3-year warranty expired and not all died at once. For example, one would die today, the other after a month - 2 months and so on. They do not give any video signal, the fans do not turn. It's not a GPU failure, that's what the master told me. He fixed all the graphics cards and says there were several breakdowns on each.

There's nothing to be upset man, I respected what's your reaction for this matter about specific problems I experienced. Sorry to tell I just base all those statements I said from my customers who let me fix their personal computers, because most of them was used in gaming and internet cafe's before pandemic days. It's a long enumeration if I would specify those previous concerns I got, but anyways big thanks for you.