Consider the source. If your source has 100's of GPUs and you have a dozen or so.. well, he is going to see a lot more of the rare distributions of capacity failures. But if you are looking for good maintenance practices then I can say:
1) a slow steady burn in of any electronics is always good as compared to slamming it with maximum duty cycle. When you come back home from vacation, do not unpack... go directly to your basement and turn on the lights so you can see your glorious mining rigs. Then press the button on your 2-wire power button to your mobo and let it boot into the OS but DO NOT start the miners! Go unpack. Come back in an hour or so and make sure all your system is running fine still without any miners running.
2) Check temperatures at your baseline/no duty cycle. If there are high temperatures here then sort this out before proceeding. May need to reboot, check gpu connections, reinstall drivers, or... you may have found a bad component in your build which should be replaced before continuing.
3) Choose a lower power algorithm such as cryptonite or Lyra2z and then do some test mining on these with NO overclocking.
4) continue watching temperatures. I recommend a handheld thermal imaging device or a laser temperature gun and point this at various points on you GPUs and the compare temperatures between them. with equal spacing between cards and a nice controlled environment you shouldn't see very large differences between various GPU components.
5) Stop the miners, activate your MSI afterburner or OC tool you use, make your OC/undervolt/power settings, and start the algo of your choice.
6) Monitor your temperatures and mining performance. Is one card terribly hot or is some other card hashing at 1/2 speed (this happened to me recently)?? If so, I recommend disable/enable GPUs in the device manager and then retrying the OC/mining software. If it's still weird, then do a reboot and try again. If it's still weird uninstall/reinstall drivers using the uninstall/cleaning software from GPU guru website.
Good luck!
edit: just joking about "do not unpack" please don't let the internet control your behavior!
Hey thanks for the tips, I basically did the same thing as you suggest by going slow, warming up the rig before doing regular OC and equihash algo. Luckily that worked well.
