Should I be mining? (or is it gonna ruin my card?)

[Nvidiaguy07]

Did it for a while. I have 2 computers at home (1070 and rx480) that could be mining while im asleep or at work. I did it for a few weeks, but then for whatever reason I started thinking the life of my GPU was more important.

I sometimes leave a PC on when im at work anyway so I can connect remotely to it.

Is there any real risk of running these for ~16 hours a day while I'm away from home? Is it gonna ruin my card? How much am I reducing its lifespan.

Just wanted to know what people think about it on here.

 

[Headfoot]

It will put additional wear on your fan and some power circuitry. So basically, it will make almost no difference in the lifespan of the card except the fan, which isn't terribly hard to replace.

 

[Crono]

It depends. I had mining kill 3 EVGA 1070s (FTW Gaming ACX 3.0) in short order (two of them dead no video output, the third artificated), but I'm not entirely sure it wasn't a bad batch of cards, or their design maybe pushing memory clock too high... or some other hardware flaw/interaction with my other parts, and not mining-specific (nothing against EVGA, by the way, good support and I'd likely buy my next Nvidia card from them).

I've had few issues using older Nvidia cards (970, 750 non-Ti) and numerous AMD cards mining 24/7 or close to it for extended periods of time (months to a little over a year).

My experience with that model of 1070 aside, you can mitigate against premature card death a bit by undervolting and cooling the cards sufficiently, ensuring you have good power delivery (quality power supply, using a UPS), and keeping the fans clear of dust. They will likely still wear faster due to continuous operation versus gaming an hour or two a day, but most cards can last the length of an upgrade cycle even with mining 24/7.

YMMV, of course, but it's certainly possible to take care of your cards and keep them going longer than someone who doesn't take care (i.e. heavy overclocking, poor cooling and airflow, no cleaning or filtering of dust, etc) and doesn't mine. A lot of people assume mining is just ridiculously torturous and results in endless RMAs, but that need not be the case.

 

[Pneumothorax]

I dunno about AMD cards, as I stupidly never mined with the 290x's I used to have, but my FTW3 1080ti's are mining while I'm at work. I'm running them at around 50% power level which keeps their voltages around 0.8 volts and temps in the 50-60's C. I don't think I'll be hurting them that much at that low of a voltage and temp.