Topic: What temperature to keep the idle cards ? (Read 813 times)

The temperature is fine. In my opinion you should keep your cards in a static bag. This will save you from a terrible day. Because Once my basement flooded but i had the card in the static bag. There boxes were discarded but the cards were saved due to the static bag.

my storage experiences even in orig boxes, wrapped in anti statics was a little moisture effected the cooling fins with a little white residue

i would advise keep something that soaks up the mositure in each box, kinda like what they have in shoe boxes

my 2 cent from exp


oh yes and if out of warranty, i replace the thermal paste on the GPU chips with good quality paste and not some fancy mayo lol

They weren't drenched, but it looked like someone took one of those spray bottles to them on a mist setting. I think it was more how the water came in through the top and ran down in-between the heat-sink and GPU. When I said washed out, it wasn't like it was scrubbed clean, more like the consistency of the paste was loosened a bit and it ran down and out.

You are probably right on the purity of rain water that allowed it to continue to run, at the time I was sure it was going to short out any second as I raced to unplug it. For obvious reasons I wasn't just going to reach in and switch it off by hand, so I shut it down via GUI and unplugged it via the surge suppressor cord some feet away.

I have no doubt that over time it will probably fail before the other rigs do. Its only been about 6 months now since "The Event" , so I will see if it goes another year or two.

Well, I could, but I'd only earn 240$ 60$ a month with my 5 cards setup... That may be not that bad when thinking about it... Last time I checked, it was a lot less, so it seems it has climbed back a bit. Thanks to you I'm considering putting it back to work. I hesitate .

Edit : 240$ is the raw revenue, 60$ is what I get after paying the electricity bill. Not worth it, as I told me one month ago !

For the other replies, thank you, that's nice, I'll sleep with a welcome peace of mind ! I'll just check the humidity tonight.

As a fellow miner, thank you for this valuable information.

I somewhat suspected water might not be that much of an issue as rain water is barely conductive due to lack of minerals but I'd probably be just as scared of corrosion. I have to wonder though, how much water that poor rig had to endure for most of the thermal paste to wash off.

Anyway, arguably I might even go over the top in terms of taking care of my rigs (e.g. max temp is 65-72°C on all cards depending on the model with a maximum of 90% fan speed, plenty of space between them, no BIOS mods or overvolting, just some slight overclock) but I do all that because I built up a reputation of selling used cards in great condition. So far none of them came back out of dozens (knocks on wood).

I think I heard of this before too. I hope I never have to "De-moisturize" my electronics again, but I'll keep it in mind for the future. My other thought at the time was to put them in the oven on low for some hours, but the couple of days of air drying and blow dryer seemed to work.

Maybe you'll not believe it but in these cases, after shutting down the eqipment, put it in rice.
Yes, rice draws moisture out as you've never imagined. Leave it for a some hours and the you're all good.

I've seen this work on mobile phones which were dropped in water/toilet (lol).

I am running a significant number of cards this winter in my garage, so I am mainly double checking my logic as I do have concerns if all will go well.

I started running them in the garage this past summer because of too much heat in the house, and the worse experience I have had so far was when I left the back garage door open (for venting) and a storm hit with strong winds that practically had the rain coming in horizontally. It rained a bit on one of the rigs about 12' in from the door. Surprising, when my wife asked me if I left the door open because it was raining so hard, I went out and seen the rig was still running although there was visible water on it. I shut it off via the GUI and then unplugged it. I took everything apart and let it dry for a couple of days, as well as used a blow dryer to try and get the deep down moisture.

Anyway, I re-assembled it and it ran, but the GPU temperatures were very hot. Upon shutting it down and disassembling the heat-sink, I found the thermal compound had pretty much washed out. So I took all the affected GPUs apart and cleaned/reapplied thermal grease and tried it again. It is running for 6+ months now with no ill effects, but I do suspect it might end-of-life on me quicker than rigs that weren't rained on.

So I am not saying moisture or humidity is not a hazard, but I think modern electronics are a bit sturdier than we give them credit for.

My bigger concern with running out of the garage in the winter is a blast of super cold air when the garage door is opened on sub-zero days, but so far everything has been working out. In another thread a guy posted that lives in Alaska and claimed he ran his rigs in the garage will no issues, so I am banking on that experience as well.

Winter is probably different, but all I can say from experience is that I have spent several hours in the summer during storms with power outages in a thin metal plate garage (where the rigs were) soaking water off the inside of the roof where it was almost dripping in minutes from the condensation. Once the cards started running again (after a slow start, meaning idling for a while before starting mining again) it wasn't an issue of course as they made enough heat for water not to condensate on the walls inside.

Why would this be an issue? Condensation mainly happens when a cold item, such as the cards are brought into a warm humid environment. So if your cards are in garage and running, then the power goes out, the cards will cool off slower than the surrounding air, which is probably not that humid to begin with in the Wintertime. So say they are off for 12-24 hours and the cards are equal with the now cooler garage air temps, then the power comes back on, the cards will heat up before the surrounding air. In both cases the cards should be at or above the surrounding air temperature, never below.

I could see to definitely not store them in such an environment, but if they are running it shouldn't be an issue.

Can you not make some profit with Ethereum and/or Zcash mining? This should even be more so if you can offset your heat bill somewhat by leaving them run, which it sounds like you can from your description.

One more aspect to keep in mind: when storing/transporting electronic equipment (not only PC parts, all electronics) in cold weather it's best to let them sit for some time when changing their placement.
For example: if you keep your cards in 0° C for some time, when you move them in the house (20° C) let them sit for a while before powering the PC.

As forato said, if they're not powered on temp doesn't really matter (within reason), but humidity does.

Basically, just don't turn them on until you let them slowly warm up. The temperature might differ but I wouldn't turn on any rig for hard use (e.g. mining) if it has been stored around 10-15°C.

Other than the benefit of heating the house with GPU rigs, the main reason why I don't run my rigs in my garage because while the whole garage would probably be around 20°C even if the outside temp is sub zero, if there's ever a storm or power outage, it would take literally minutes until water condensates on the cards.

 What if his bed is in the basement?

If the graphics card are not powered on, you should not worry about the temperature at all. Any temperature above 0 degrees on Celsius scale should be just fine. If I were you, I'd simply put the GPU's back in their boxes and put them under my bed.

The temperature is fine.  The real issue with storing the cards in a basement would be moisture.  Watch the humidity levels and temperature fluctuations as the water vapour could condense onto the cards if the cards don't come back up to temperate as quickly as the surrounding air.   If you have sealed them in an airtight packaging, there wont be an issue.

Why did you kit mining?

So I'v stopped mining for now, and probably for ever. I'll probably convert the cards into gaming setups, and for the older ones (RX 380 and 970) that's certain. But until that time that might not come very soon, I need to keep them somewhere. For the about 2 or 3 weeks that passed since I've shutted them down, they've not moved. The basement where they are was once heated by them, but not it isn't anymore and temperature is probably getting under 10°C at night. Is it a risk for them ?