Will bitcoin mining ruin a GPU?

CaffeineMan

CaffeineMan

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 29, 2013
Messages
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I am looking to buy a used Radeon 6870 for gaming.

(Please pardon my noobness)

Will bitcoin mining ruin the GPU?
How do I know if it was used for bitmining?
Is there any test I can do on the card to ensure it is in good working order?
Can I get the card for $60 shipped? (I told my wife I would not be spending too much and I already got a 256gb SSD.)
 
Forgot to ask:
Will overclocking ruin the 6870? (I am not overclocking this board until it cannot run the games I want it too.)
Is there a way to tell if the board was overclocked?
My current system is almost good enough for my current game selection. My gaming taste may change if I have a system to run better games.
 
I would say that the risk is associated with running the card under full load for extended periods of time, which heats up the chips and causes faster transistor degradation, its hard to say what and when/if there is actual damage caused. Also it could wear down the fans which could get very annoying if they get loud. I would run some stress tests on the card like fur mark or something, and if the card is stable I would say play it until you cant anymore :)
 
You will be fine. Might as well have it make you some money while its idle. For me thats almost all the time at this stage.
 
Just letting you know that with the difficulty rating right now you won't be making money mining using GPUs.
 
Overclock the core, underclock the RAM, just keep temps in check and you'll be fine. Dozens of supercompute clusters all over the world run GPU's at 100% load 24/7/365. The silicon isn't going to mind as long as voltages and temps are reasonable. It's fans and caps and such you should worry about failing, watch out for dust buildup.
 
Trimlock said:
There are some newbie ones out there now on scrypt, I have my laptop set up on one right now. The [H] should do a sponsored pool.
Click to expand...
How do the pools work?
Lets say I use my current box c2d and I am in the same pool as an overclocked i7 with 2 GPU.
 
I dont think cpus really matter at this point at least with scrypt mining. So really as long as you have you video card hooked to the computer even at pciexpress 1x you should be golden assuming you have your miners hitting your gpu. As far as pools you are basically sharing the load of finding coins and you get your percentage out of what is mined. So for math sake say it takes 1000 shares to go find a coin and you put 2 shares in during that round you will get 2/1000 coins to your account. Be careful as some pools have fees and the like.

I hope this helps.
 
Op, things to consider.

Its not advisable to leave a machine alone running high power.
Be sure you have a decent quality PSU that can easily cope with the load , especially if left alone.
Keep temps down of the GPU, video ram, Video VRMs, CPU, system ram, motherboard VRMs.
Use extra fans if needed.

If boosting the voltage when overclocking, the amount of power/heat increases exponentially with voltage.
Be sure that you can keep heat under control as you risk limiting the life of the card and under extreme circumstances there is a risk of fire.

Keep the machine free of dust and monitor temps closely.
 
What's an unsafe temperature? My gigabyte 7950 rarely ever goes above 60C, but my twin frozr has been up to 86C, although in general it is sticking a bit below 80C (75-78)
 
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