Did I make it harder to sell your crappy, used crypto mining graphics card? Good - TechRadar

Opinion: The best time to stop crypto mining was 2009.

The piece I wrote earlier this week dissuading readers from buying a used graphics card right now seems to have hit a nerve with many in the crypto community, and it was utterly predictable.

With crypto miners buying up all the best graphics cards to endlessly run ether hashing algorithms, there's been nary a GPU for the many gamers out there, even to the point that Nvidia was forced to implement new software and hardware tricks to try to limit the hash rate of their graphics cards to make more supply available to gamers who were left out in the cold.

So now that the crypto bubble has popped and everyone is scrambling to sell the graphics cards they spent thousands of dollars on in an attempt to break even, some did not take kindly to my suggestion that the best possible outcome is that crypto miners get absolutely soaked.

A used graphics card just isn't a good purchase right now.

Graphics cards are no different, and normally it would just be a matter of doing proper research and buying from reputable sources, particularly if a card is refurbished and comes with some kind of additional commercial guarantee from the seller.

There's also a lot of competition right now among sellers – moreso than normal – to get you to buy their card over someone else's, so they have every incentive to lie to you or obfuscate the condition of the graphics card so that you'll buy it.

If you can't afford to buy a card in new condition, buying a used one is a totally legitimate way to get the equipment you need.

I'd even say look into buying a used GPU later this year once people start upgrading to next-gen cards and want to recoup some cost on a two-year-old RTX 3070!

Graphics cards aren't singularities freed from the constraints of chemistry and physics. Any claim that constant crypto mining doesn't wear out a graphics card over time is either spoken out of ignorance or duplicity?

Now what about the claim that gaming wears out graphics cards faster than mining does.

If tens of thousands of wannabe hardcore PC gamers bought up all the graphics cards, abused the hell out of them, and then tried to sell them on the second-hand market for any significant fraction of MSRP, I'd be sending gamers into a rage this week instead of miners by telling readers that they can't trust those cards either and so maybe now is not the best time to buy a used card. .

But the market isn't being flooded with graphics cards from gamers whose PC maintenance practices are entirely unknown, so the kind of damage gamers are doing to their cards is, at best, tangentially relevant to this conversation. .

No, we're dealing with a glut of mining cards right now, many of them coming from mining farms where they've been locked up in a warehouse with hundreds of other cards grinding out ether for over a year.

Miners swear that they take better care of their cards than gamers?

I'm sure a lot of miners do, but are you negotiating with that kind of miner when you buy that used graphics card.

Who do you think is out there right now selling their used mining cards that they totally swear are totally fine and are absolutely worth a significant fraction of a new card's MSRP.

You need to talk to [Linus Tech Tips] and get the real truth on used v cards from miners as they take better care of ther [sic] cards better than a gamer the under vote [sic] the cards and all so be for you spout off that used cards are not worth buying Kinda makes me think u was paid buy [sic] nvidia to say such dumb [expletive].

"Oh, oh, but Linus Tech Tips proves that mining doesn't degrade graphics card performance so you're just an Nvidia shill!" .

The cards Linus Tech Tips tests came from a miner who – assuming these cards were actually used to mine as claimed – took exceptionally good care of their cards.

I only care that our readers don't get screwed, and there are a lot of shady miners selling graphics cards on the second-hand market right now.

I've heard from parents trying to upgrade their kids' gaming PC with even the best cheap graphics cards like the RTX 2060 who have been completely unable to do so

I've spoken to gamers who spent an entire night on line outside of a Manhattan Best Buy hoping to get a graphics card that they could barely afford only to get pushed out of the way by line-cutters who were only there to buy the card so they could resell it on eBay to a crypto miner for twice the MSRP

One way to help all this along is to disincentivize crypto miners from even thinking about buying a Lovelace or RDNA 3 card for mining purposes later this year

The best way to do that is to not bail them out now that crypto has crashed and mining isn't profitable. 

Or, maybe, a lot of miners need to sell these graphics cards in order to either break even or make a profit because they recognize that crypto is a scam and might never recover and they're left holding a bag that they would really rather not be holding

For two years, nothing about this entire graphics card market has been in gamers' control, but finally this one thing is. 

You don't have to make whole the crypto miners who mocked you on Twitter when you complained about not being able to buy a new graphics card

Treat these used up graphics cards like they were EA Lootboxes and slam the door in their faces

Maybe miners will learn that crypto mining just doesn't pay and they give it up for good. 

Not only will refusing to buy these cards now help restore the graphics card market to sanity going forward, it'll also give us a better shot at averting the worse effects of the climate crisis if we can convince more people to give up on crypto mining or never take it up in the first place.