It's still not that simple, there is a financial incentive to run your cards at their most efficient settings. Mining profitably, regardless of number of cards or operation size, depends on the miner correctly setting up their equipment and making sure that equipment is taken care of.
However I will concede two important facts related to mining that everyone should be aware of:
1. Cards used for mining will likely have diminished cooler lifespan, significantly so if run at 100%. This will not matter as much for coolers using quality ball bearing fans.
2. Cards not run in a climate controlled environment may well have humidity related issues, I'd personally avoid these. It should be easy to spot via corrosion on aluminum fins where the fans directly blow on them.
I've said it in multiple posts, but all my early bitcoin mining cards are still functional as far as I'm aware and have far outlasted their useful life.
Of those cards, I still have possession of 3x MSI Lightning AMD 6970s and 1x reference ATI 5870; they are still fine and would have served a new owner well had I sold them.
EDIT:
And for that matter where do we draw the line when criticizing people for using their cards for non gaming purposes? Do we also chastise the DC crowd when they sell off their equipment? Folks who use cards in mini render farms?
What about folks who've dabbled in all three like myself??
I used my 2x 290x Lightnings, with an overclock, to mine Monero and then Ethereum for a little while. I've been waiting to upgrade my gaming PC to a solid single GPU and then migrate these down to the homelab to run it without worrying about heating up my home office.
But after quite some time, I was able to dial in miner settings that reached peak mining capability (not necessarily peak power efficiency) with constant overclocks. I always ran it with that. And no cheeto fingers required.
I'd have to downclock or edit miner settings to deal with absolute power limitations (running up too high against the UPS limits, it would freak lol).
If/when I get back into mining I'm going to do it right: besides reusing these two GPUs from my gaming PC once I upgrade it, I'll probably end up buying some more GPUs specifically for the task. That or hop on the ASIC rig train on a rising currency, like SiaCoin or Decred (if they don't crash permanently, that is).
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