Bitcoin Forum

One would assume that no matter how you set your stuff up, you're obviously shorting the life of some parts, especially GPU's and PSU's.

I have two miners, neither are dedicated. One is my main machine and the other is my media server. One's running 2 5830's and the other is running 2 5770's.

I've blown through a 5830 and looks like the PSU in my main system decided to give in too. In its defense.


How much hardware have you gone through?

If your PSU gave out, then it probably wasn't the right wattage. I've had my 550W PSU for over 3 years, running nearly 24/7, and for the past few months at 100% 24/7, and he hasn't given in yet.

But to answer your question, none yet. My desktop (which I've have had the parts for many years) is still running strong, with no signs of problems. My dedicated miner with 2x5830's is running just fine, with no signs of problems either (except for when the power went out, damn you lightning storms).

Guess I could rephrase the thread title... Not "due to mining" but miner components.. Stuff goes.. Just seems to go faster when mining with it.

It had a 650w PSU in there with two 5830's with no OC. I've had that PSU running 24/7 for about 2 years though.

Funny thing... I've lost hardware due to surges before so now even though I have good surge protectors I unplug shit if there's a big thunder storm. Went out for supper tonight and there was a thunderstorm warning so I unplugged some stuff before I left. Came back, storm was over so I plugged my stuff back in and it wouldn't boot right.

I'm actually not 100% sure its the PSU.. At first it was powering on and off, only getting so far, nothing would show up on screen. I unplugged the power cables out of one card, just to see if for some odd reason the psu was under too much load.... It came up but could find the hard drive. Not sure the drive was powering on though. Should have checked. Checked the drive on another machine and its fine. I gotta put an old drive in there and double check... Its either the PSU or the motherboard but so far i'm betting on the PSU.

Fun times. I wish my wholesaler was open 24/7. Would be so convenient.

Two 5830's were blowing some of their hot exhaust air towards my RAID 0 array.  Lost a drive and the array.  Also, I think my original mining card is fried from mining.  The screen tears and flickers even at stock clock speeds now.

I had one of my 5830's do that. I started getting some green static even with it not OC'd. ( It had been lightly OC'd for a couple days ). It did that within 1 week.

Sucks about the array. Hope you didn't lose any data of value. That was my main concern tonight. Once I made sure my drive was fine I felt a lot better. I had a couple things on there that hadn't been backed up. :/

one 1200 watt psu - before it died, there was some smoke - burn baby burn ...

One of my lovely overclocked 5870 (giving steady 425 MH/s) died recently. Probably voltage regulator. Not sure if it was due to mining, I kept card pretty cool. I miss it a lot  >:(

Returned it for warranty repair, but it will take 30 days and most probably they will refund me, cos there are no more 5870's. Loosing 425MH/s for 30 days is a lot of money lost!

I've lost one Setsugen custom cooled 5870 (reference design) to swapping cards. I probably put too much physical strain on the gpu. Now I get a reboot (or sometimes hang, IIRC) when I try to boot X from that card, and bios spits out a "HyperTransport error" afterwards :/

Tip: Don't go handling cards just from the heatsink/cooler, support them from the pcb as well.

I don't get it....
- buy new hardware under warranty, free replacements within 2 years if you break them
- buy used hardware out of warrant, pays for itself in 3 months anyway
- sell hardware while still functional: not your issue if it breaks down due to decay
- sell hardware while broken: receive a percentage of the value for the good recycled parts in the components

I'm curious what temperature you kept it at, just so I have an idea for my own card.

Reference 5850, little more than a year old, has lived a hard life of benching/folding/SETI/M@H and now BTC.
Water cooled with MCW60 and reused stock back plate with 80mm fan attached. However the stock back plate makes no contact to the smd capacitor that failed at 1000/300 1.2v 55c gpu 115c vrm's. Still works at stock clocks with 1v, however I will be replacing the cap. and have it back up to speed.
http://i55.tinypic.com/o9ed6d.jpg

It was lower card of two, so it was cooler all the time than the above. The temperatures did not go over 75C all time.

I checked a forum in my local e-shop and some other customers had problem with this particular card.

Temp of the core doesn't indicate a stable card. The VRM will melt if you overvolt 30% and push clock frequencies +250mhz for 24/7 use.

There's a guy on the forum running 6990's super oc'ed in a ventilated cabinet. He refused to believe the cards could die at 60c. Electromigration and decay of the voltage regulator will still accelerate the card's death massively.

Just lost a 700w Thermaltake "Tough Power" psu.... not so tough after all I guess.  Seeing if the dude I bought it from on ebay will assist w\ RMA since he had it listed saying it has 5 years warranty. 

That's the 2nd piece of hardware I've lost mining.  The other was a 5830 I accidentally shorted out.

Lost a Kingwin 850w PSU, just started smoking and burnt out, thankfully I was home.

It was handling 3x5850's OC'ed 900 Core / 300 Mem

This is why people should never buy no-name PSUs. In the worst case scenario you ruin all of the components in the system. In the apocalypse scenario your house will be on fire when you return home.

Spend the extra $100-$150 on a robust Corsair/Seasonic/Silverstone PSU, have it last for years and get peace of mind.

I undervolt my stuff, so nothing has died yet.

In my past experience, components typically shorten their lifetime when OCed or at high temp, without OC or cooled at a <40 degree never failed any of my components, maybe temp is the only killer