Mining with semi-defective cards?

[HeroMiner]

Some ppl are selling graphics cards with failures, such as the displayed image contains artifacts, weird patterns of random colored pixels or turns all green after a few seconds, etc.

Has anyone experience with such cards? How are the chances that cards with issues like that are still good for mining?

[bmgjet]

Might work but youll probably get a lot of invaid/stales in the client. Not to mention blue screens if your using windows.
Depending on the fault you might be able to fix it tho.
 Could be caused from bad cooler contact causing high temps or under clocking the memory or gpu could fix the errors.

[Isepick]

You get what you pay for...Mining stresses cards out pretty well, and if a card can't operate normally, then don't expect it to handle the load of mining.

[um0rion]

I bought a 5870 for $125 shipped that the seller said had no video output... I figured it'd be perfect for a mining rig. Got it home, tried it out, and there was nothing I could do to get it working right. I havent pulled the cooler off yet, but if it was plugged into the board with no power connections it'd run the fan full tilt, and I could get into windows. With both power connections, the fan ran but very quietly, and windows/linux boot would freeze as soon as it got to the windows logo. Upon feeling the card, it was ridiculously hot even just after a few seconds. I tried flashing bioses, booting safe mode, updating drivers.. Nothing has worked so far.

Id say there's a shot something like that might work, but right now what I bought as a defective card with no display is pretty close to garbage. Id say find cheap cards that work for mining, other than that, you really dont want to deal with something that's defective. Ive got a system with 5 cards I was trying to add it on to, and for every hour I played with it, that was an hour that my miners werent able to be working. Not a huge amount of time as I pretty quickly diagnosed that I wouldnt be getting it working anytime soon, but still.

[bmgjet]

Sounds like a bad bios flash. Have you tried blind flashing it with a stock bios.

[um0rion]

Yes, Ive flashed it with an Asus bios (Its XFX) and a stock XFX bios. Both complete successfully, but the card refuses to allow windows to boot. I think as soon as it begins to initialize something in the card makes everything lock up.

[HeroMiner]

Hmm ok, seems like the idea wasn't as good as I thought then .

Thanx for the input and good luck in re-selling your card um0rion .

[bmgjet]

Other thing you can try is to flash bios with lower clocks.
Or buy a new card same brand then return defective one.

[nomnomnom]

Yes, Ive flashed it with an Asus bios (Its XFX) and a stock XFX bios. Both complete successfully, but the card refuses to allow windows to boot. I think as soon as it begins to initialize something in the card makes everything lock up.

Lol this may sound retarded, but...

have you tried to put it in the oven? LOL

a lot of people seem to have success putting defective gpus in the oven for a short time.
That sometimes fixes it and the card works again. Its worth a try if its defective anyway.

Google gpu oven if you don't believe me

Works also with motherboards, recently fixed a motherboard with a defective pcie slot,
put it in the oven at 190 Celsius for 7 minutes, works again
(I shielded the plastic parts with aluminium foil)

[kwiky]

+1 to the oven trick.

I've baked a few video cards in the past, and two xbox 360s and all are working well to this day.

Just basically a poor mans reflow station.

[bmgjet]

Getting a little blow torch and carefully heating up the chip would be better since you wouldnt be baking all the caps which dont like being over 105C

Or the heat gun method used on xboxs.