Why You Probably Shouldn’t Buy A Used Graphics Card

In most circumstances, you have no way of knowing what a second-hand card was used for and how it was treated before you bought it. If you do know and trust the previous owner — say your PC gaming friend who treats their tech with the utmost respect is upgrading and offers you their old card at a discount — you’ll probably be fine taking them up on the offer. However, the majority of used cards on the market at the moment will have been used to mine crypto. That means they were running at high capacity 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year round. The bigger miners may have had hundreds of cards, so were unlikely to have cleaned and inspected every one of them routinely.

However, this may not necessarily mean a card will have problems. Linus, of Linus Tech Tips fame, responded to GPU manufacturer Palit Microsystems’ claim that “a card used for mining 24 hours per day, seven days per week, will lose 10% of its performance each year.” He tested cards that had been mining crypto for different periods of time all the way up to four years. Linus came to the conclusion that the cards will either break completely or they won’t — mining will not make them lose a set amount of performance over a period of time. The tech vlogger did note that maintenance would make a difference and overheating problems caused by dust and dirt buildup would affect performance. Linus’ conclusion was that a clean, well-maintained card should be okay no matter what it was used for — and at a significant discount, it could be worth a gamble.