You Can Buy a Mined GPU for Gaming and Live to Tell The Tale

Graphics cards used for mining cryptocurrency are just as good as new cards, proved tech YouTuber Linus Tech Tips (LTT) in one of his latest videos.

In recent years, reports have indicated that graphics cards used for crypto mining are overworked and have a reduced lifespan. Many have warned against using GPUs for mining. However, LTT has disproved these claims by testing roughly 25 mining cards against brand-new cards that were barely used.

The YouTuber anonymously acquired used crypto-mining graphics cards over the past year that had seen significant usage. The test involved several RTX 3060, 3070, and 3080 GPUs from NVIDIA and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics cards from an AMD partner.

Out of all the cards tested, only two were found to be defective due to mining. These two were the Gigabyte Eagle RTX 3060 OC and the Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 XT GPU, both of which were eliminated due to alarmingly low clock speeds and high temperatures. The Eagle RTX 3060 also had poor VRAM performance.

The Sapphire RX 5700 XT did not pass the Kombustor test but performed admirably during gaming benchmark tests compared to the other used GPUs.

However, all other used graphics cards performed well against LTT’s own GPUs, proving that purchasing mined cards is not a terrible idea after all, but buyers should approach it with caution. In fact, some even outperformed the RTX 3080 Founders Edition in games.

We recommend watching the video for more details.