Be careful when buying “refurbished” and “used” graphics cards. You’ll never know where they’ve been and how long it will last (after purchase).
Taken from TPU … With the once-lucrative business of cryptocurrency mining now slowly falling out of favor for discrete graphics, crypto miners are turning their heads to creative solutions to “refurbish” and sell their remaining inventory to third-party users. When GPU components, such as the die or GDDR memory, overheat, they can produce visual signs of damage, such as discoloration or melting. Some miners have started painting the memory on their GPU’s boards with special thermal paint to hide the wear and tear from the naked eye and make the GDDR chips appear new in hopes that no one would notice. According to Iskandar Souza and TecLab, their cases are now getting debunked.
As these reports note, miners are removing the stock cooling systems from GPUs to install a third-party solution or recently tried to resolder failed GPU dies back in place and paint the yellowish GDDR memory chips. According to the testing done by Iskandar Souza, you can see below the difference between a worn-out yellowish GDDR chip and its painted deception standing next to one another. Below you can also see the process of resoldering failed GPUs back in place. Crypto miners have been very careful to make them look almost as brand new, so GPU buyers from third-party sources need to be extra cautious before making a purchase.
Source: TPU, Iskandar Souza (YouTube), TecLab (YouTube), via Tom’s Hardware
