Will minning bitcoins kill your card? - page 2.

P4man

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Quote from: BCMan on January 18, 2012, 11:29:23 PM

I don't think videocard can die if everything tuned properly, otherwise it can die even from playing games with high AA @ stock frequencies!

And its not like videocards that are not used for mining ever die Huh

Its really simple, any silicon chip thats used will eventually die. Its a given. The only question is how long it will take. It could be centuries, it could be days. But stressing these chips will reduce their lifespan, particularly when overvolting and overheating. If you are lucky, you may never notice, but it doesnt change the facts.

ensign_lee

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Been running the 5870's at 900 Mhz, underclocking the memory to 1000. The 5970 I left at stock because I wanted it to last awhile (lasted all of 2.5 months until 1 GPU just outright failed lol). Stock voltages.

Most of my cards live at around 80 celcius, with some of them getting to be in their own cases living at 70-75 celcius instead.

Two of them have the weirdest problem: they will be fine under load, but when you let them idle, then they display erratic screens. lol.

For those of you above who said that you have had 0 fail, have you tested them as display monitors? Where you hook them up to 2 screens? I ask because for some of the cards, they are fine on 1 screen but if you ask them to display two then they start artifacting, which to me is still a failure.

BCMan

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I don't think videocard can die if everything tuned properly, otherwise it can die even from playing games with high AA @ stock frequencies!

Look at my radeon 5770 stats:

850(stock)/300:
temp1: 69.5
temp2: 74
temp3: 73
fan speed: 51%
VDDC:1.125 v
191.31 mhash/s

850/1200 (fully stock):
temp1: 74
temp2: 80.5
temp3: 78
fan speed: 56%
VDDC: 1.125 v
196.59 mhash/s

960/300:
temp1: 73
temp2: 78
temp3: 76.5
fan: 55%
VDDC: 1.125 v
221.10 mhash/s

Thats funny, but OCed it's even a bit colder than stock and with much higher mhash/s! So, if it will die, then it will die with stock freq. earlier than with 960/300! And difference in temp and fan speed with 850/300 is very tiny.

UPD with undervolted card.
960/300/1.005v:
temp1: 67
temp2: 71
temp3: 70
fan: 50%
221.39 mhash/s

jake262144

full member

Activity: 210

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For me it's 0/7 GPUs. All in fine working order, the oldest of them running since summer. Undervolting is crucial IMO.

They've not been idling, either. The ASUS hd6950 DCII 1GB (which I detest for its non-standard VRM, BTW) has been running since early September at 942 MHz. This is the max stable setting for this particular card using any recent AMD driver and 2.5 SDK. At 945 it will lock up in minutes.

Scoring a perfect 10/10 failured cards, surely you must have done something wrong? Shocked

May I ask what temps and fan speeds you've been running those cards at?

bitcool

legendary

Activity: 1441

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Live and enjoy experiments

Mostly had problems with the fans, only one fried chip on a XFX 5970

DeathAndTaxes

donator

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Gerald Davis

Quote from: ensign_lee on January 18, 2012, 12:06:17 AM

I've been mining since June with with about 10 GPUs. Most of them 5870s, with some assorted 5850s, 5770s and a 5970 thrown in themix.

EVERY. SINGLE. ONE of them now has problems. Some of them have outright failed, others just artifact and are still good for mining, but not really as a display card anymore. I can't discount 10/10 cards as mere coincidence. So yes, they definitely do kill your cards.

What clock, voltage, fans, and temp. I have been mining w/ 15 5970 for much longer than that and they are all solid. I did have to replace 2 fans so far and likely will need to replace them all eventually but that is because they are Chinese junk. Then again I don't abuse them with high temps, voltages, and clocks.

ensign_lee

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Activity: 886

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I've been mining since June with with about 10 GPUs. Most of them 5870s, with some assorted 5850s, 5770s and a 5970 thrown in themix.

EVERY. SINGLE. ONE of them now has problems. Some of them have outright failed, others just artifact and are still good for mining, but not really as a display card anymore. I can't discount 10/10 cards as mere coincidence. So yes, they definitely do kill your cards.

MiningBuddy

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฿itcoin ฿itcoin ฿itcoin

I've had problems with 2 of my 9 cards which went live April/May 2011 time.
Card 1 died on me around October. The fans would spin up on power on but no post or display, upon further inspection it was apparent that a single cable from my pcie plug had come loose and fell out. Not sure if that was the cause or just a coincidence.
Card 2's fan bearings seized on me just before Christmas. Bought an aftermarket cooler as an rma would have left me with an alternate model.

Both cards were overclocked to just before the point of crashing, fan speed a constant 85% and temps were always under 70C, even in the hight of summer. They were made by XFX to which I am trying to avoid in the future Cheesy

PatrickHarnett

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Because this has popped up in my un-read section, I can add another 5970 to my dead pile, but I did also swap a fan between my XFX 5970 into the sapphire card.

P4man

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Quote from: mc_lovin on December 27, 2011, 08:22:04 PM

IMHO, unless you have FREE or extremely cheap electricity, overvolting or overclocking is pointless because it will cost you so much more on your power bill.

Overclocking actually increases efficiency at a given voltage. Power consumption of the card scales at most linearly with clock, meaning the entire rig's (including CPU, ram, motherboard etc) power scales less than linearly with the gpu clock. Performance does scale linearly, so MH/W improves as you overclock the gpu. Overvolting OTOH is of course not going to increase power efficiency, its going to reduce it quite dramatically.

mc_lovin

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www.bitcointrading.com

IMHO, unless you have FREE or extremely cheap electricity, overvolting or overclocking is pointless because it will cost you so much more on your power bill. Just pulling numbers out of my ass, think 25% more power for 5% more bitcoin. Might as well run stock or overclock it to the point that's stock-like.

edit: not only the cost of electricity, but you end up saving a lot of money in cards not dying.

Jack of Diamonds

sr. member

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Not necessarily, but the short term risk of fan failure reaches 100% pretty fast if you run the cards 24/7 at full or very high fan speed.
So if you still have hardware in use for mining, there is a very high chance the fans will start failing one by one.

I didn't have *all* fans fail on my cards but a fair amount did.

P4man

hero member

Activity: 518

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Amazing huh, by being careful and keeping a watchful eye on your hardware you end up killing it. And surprisingly its not well known.

As for your temps; Id really look in to an aftermarket cooler. Look at this asus slide:

Ignore the absolute numbers, its for solid cap VRMS on a motherboard, which unlike with videocard VRMs, rarely blow out anyway. The point here is that that operating temperatures decreases life expectancy exponentially.

Unfortunately, I cant monitor VRM temps on my current cards, but the same logic holds true for the GPU itself. My 5850s dont break ~60C (on the default sensor but that also means around 70C on sensor #2 in GPU-Z). Thats with a standard cooler (albeit non reference). My 5870 with reference cooler should come in today, about the first thing Ill do is fit a VRM cooler (thermal right R5) and see if my accelero twin turbo is good enough.

Aftermarket coolers tend to be pricy if you are running a bitcoin farm, but you can almost always reuse them for a new card, even if some minor modding might be needed. So I bought a pile of battle-axe cooler second hand for 6 euro each, that will come in handy if I decide to expand further.

bronan

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Lazy Lurker Reads Alot

I am reading this carefull and found indeed the same disturbing change in volts on my 5870 ... never knew nor even looked at it before.
Simply because i do never overvolt, i think you hit the hammer at the right spot with your answer
This might have killed the old ati card as well, all though that can never be proofed anymore.
Anyway i turned of 2 programs which where monitoring the hardware simultanious.
I decided only to keep afterburner running for keep an eye on my gpu's cause of the cpu gets too hot it gets turned of by the bios
On the temps i would say max for long term running is still about 90c, with some peaks near 100c anything above i consider dangerous if longer then a few minutes.
The cooler you can run them the longer they will last or die

Quote

also be sure to check VRM temperatures if you can. Not all cards support it, but if yours do, check GPU-Z. Try to keep those under 100C

brrr lol mine second cards do come over 100c since they are stuck to each other in the case

P4man

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Thats quite a drop. Something aint right there. Be VERY careful never to use 2 temperature monitoring apps at once, like GPU-Z, Everest, Trixx or afterburner. There is a bug in those cards that can trigger voltage to spike to 1.65V if two apps are monitoring :
http://www.overclock.net/amd-ati/648462-hd-5870-random-voltage-bump-1-a.html

I killed a 5850 that way:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/5850-sudden-runaway-temperature-44495

It only worked for a few weeks after that happened.

Anyway, to answer the question. 60C is great. 70C is my personal pain limit. Anything over that is not a good idea to run 24/7. Its not like it will instantly fry at 85C, but its not good for longevity either.

also be sure to check VRM temperatures if you can. Not all cards support it, but if yours do, check GPU-Z. Try to keep those under 100C

pinarphan

newbie

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Hummm... Double checked and it is Celcius but now the fan is at 76% and the temp is 60 C. How hot is too hot?

P4man

hero member

Activity: 518

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No mate, that way too cool. you will wear your fans out in no time for nothing. but I kinda doubt anything other than chilled water cooling would keep the card at that temperature. Unless you mean 86 celcius, which I would consider too high.

pinarphan

newbie

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I got 2 5850's running at 86% fan and 86 degrees F. Is that too hot?

P4man

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Quote from: jjiimm_64 on October 23, 2011, 03:50:34 PM

here is a good analogy.

if you buy a car, put it on the highway and floor it, how long will it last? myguess: 20,000 miles?

You might be surprised.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov8m8gJNeGA
For those not wanting to watch the boring video, saab put a couple of regular 5 door cars on a test circuit and floored them for 100000 Km. IIRC, they only changed tires and topped oil. This is 25 years ago with cars that frankly, where no good (Ive had one for a short while decades ago. To be fair it had 250.000 Km on it when I got it lol, so perhaps they were not that bad).

Anyway, the car analogy is somewhat flawed, as I think flooring a car non stop is probably less abusive than driving it in the city, doing short distances and lots of cold/warm heat cycles. Although some of that actually may apply to gpu's as well (the heat cycles).

Electromigration is the real killer. The longer you run the card, the hotter you run the card, and particularly the higher you set the voltage, the bigger the chance of a card failing due to electro migration. I cant think of a good car analogy, other perhaps than tires wearing out and eventually blowing, but more info here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration

edit: btw the last paragraph of that wiki article also explain why "baking" a card in an oven can sometimes fix it, if the electromigration occured in a solder joint. Heating it and melting the solder again, can actually fix it.

jjiimm_64

legendary

Activity: 1876

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here is a good analogy.

if you buy a car, put it on the highway and floor it, how long will it last? myguess: 20,000 miles?

if you buy a car, put it on the highway and go 80 MPH. how long will it last? myguess: 180,000 miles? or more

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