I see no one has yet mentioned another very important component besides GPU core temps and fans,
I'm talking about VRM - build quality and temperature,
we all know various 3rd party card manufacturers have different designs for their graphic cards, they put together different quality components such as heatsink/vents, memory, VRM, phase number, chokes, FETs and lots of other electronic components I'm not aware of...
I understand some manufacturers use worse VRMs and some use better, to my knowledge better ones are rated at 125°C and cheaper at 105°C
Generally when buying a graphic card for mining you want your card made of best quality components or at least as much higher quality components as possible(at least that's what I'm going for as a top priority when picking cards after I decided which gpu I want)
I really wish 3rd party manufacturers would share at least what electronic components they used when assembling their cards instead of aggressively marketing we have this much core/mem speed, that much better boost in performance and such, no other way than buying a card and stripping everything down attached to it
miners besides overall efficiency in gpu chip care a great deal about card durability...
for a specific gpu chip, let's say, Hawaii 390 model
Not gonna talk about performance but just life durability,
It's a big difference deciding if you wanna get Sapphire's or Vtx3d's 390 card
of course the price is also different but not always necessarily by a lot.
I used sapphire/vtdx3d comparison because Sapphire is one of the most experienced amd card manufacturers and well known as a good quality card manufacturer alongside msi, asus and probably some others(I wouldn't know for sure)
vtx3d's main selling point was that they were cheaper choice/variant of amd cards manufacturer, they went bankrupt and were bought by powercolor few years ago.
In general cheaper components means less durable card but as xleejohnx has already said it, sometimes it depends on your luck,
you can get e.g. 1 sapphire card out of 1 000 cards that is crappy built, badly manufactured, it happens...
of course you can get a good vtx3d card too which will outlast average sapphire's 390 lifespan
back to temps,
I try my best to keep my gpu cores at least below 70°C if not around 60°C or below for 24/7 workload
Since I'm in mediterranean climate it's not uncommon to see during daytime core temps jump to 68°C~69°C even when underclocked(note that I have power hungry sapphire 390/390x cards in my rigs) and it's not even summer yet.
My VRM on these cards usually go around 10°C above the gpu core temp, which is fine considering they have higher temp rating than core.
It's a shame that 390(x) are so far the last generation of amd cards that have VRM temp sensors included, since Fury gpu-z doesn't show anything else but core temps
Anyone had good ol' 5970? that beast had 3 sensors per core and not even mentioning vrm sensors
