- New GPUs are expensive.
Ooh, ah, oh my money bone.
But the media says that buying a secondhand GPU is risky.
Ooh, it's a bad idea.
Well, as a ruthless deal hunter, I disagree.
And to prove my point, I bought 19 used GPUs to run
through our gauntlet of over 1500 tests,
settling this argument once and for all.
Every one of these GPUs was sourced anonymously
from 17 different sellers on eBay.
And we looked at everything
from clock speeds to performance to thermals.
We did run into some pitfalls, but with our help,
there's no reason for you to be afraid.
So when the time comes to adopt your rescue GPU,
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- When we bought these cards last year,
we took a shotgun approach, trying to get a mixture
of different brands at a variety of price points.
The only requirement was that
at some point they had to have been desirable
for mining and hard to find for gamers.
So we ended up with some Radeon 5700 series cards.
These were super power efficient
and lower demand compared to the NVIDIA competition,
making them some of the most profitable cards for mining.
On the green side of things,
3060s were popular thanks to their high VRAM
to price ratio and not to mention the failure
of NVIDIA's foolish attempt to limit hash rates.
And as for 3070s and 3080s,
well they were just plain powerful.
Now, whenever you're buying used,
step one is to talk to the seller.
As much as people like to paint crypto miners
as evil monsters, and some of them are,
the majority of used GPU sellers are just regular people
who saw a way to make some extra cash
and would happily tell you about the card's history.
Step two then is to inspect the product for obvious issues
physical damage, wear and tear, scratches,
or in the case of a GPU, any loose components,
be they fans or capacitors.
I'd recommend
at this stage giving the GPU a good shake, for real.
Then you wanna investigate the source
of any of the noises that you hear.
Now for obvious reasons, it would be best to do this
before handing over your money, like if you were to meet up
in person through Facebook Marketplace.
But eBay buyer protection is really good these days,
meaning that you can do it after the fact.
If you use a good marketplace.
Just make sure to report any issues with the condition
of the product before the time limit runs out.
Now most of our cards arrived looking pretty good
other than maybe needing a quick blast of compressed air,
which seems to support the theory
that I've seen many times that miners actually
are financially incentivized to take good care
of their cards in hopes of maximizing their lifespans.
However, we also got a couple
that were in questionable condition and that,
how do I put this?
Kind of smelled.
It has kind of a vinegar smell to it.
And then there's that MSI 5700 XT
with the rattle to it, but that otherwise looks good.
Of course, looks is only enough
if you're planning to use your new GPUs as bookends.
We want to know how they perform.
The best way to determine
if their performance has been affected by their time
in the mines would be to measure these GPUs
against identical brand new ones.
Unfortunately, however, these are older cards
and mint condition ones don't really exist.
So the control lines that you see
on our charts are going to be
from lightly used GPUs from our stock
that have spent most of their lives on the shelf.
It's worth noting here by the way
that we expect some degree of variation between these cards.
And the goal here is not to find the winner
but rather to see
if our used GPUs are performing within spec.
A quick and dirty way to check this is MSI Combustor.
It takes just a couple of minutes.
So it's the kind of thing that you could ask a seller to run
before you hand over your money.
If your GPU is significantly degraded,
its clock speeds may fail to reach a normal level
and right out of the gate, it's obvious
that some of our samples do have some problems.
The maximum and average clock speeds of our 3080s
and our 3070s check out nicely with some variance
but nothing that would indicate an issue.
Meanwhile, our 3060 results show us
our first obvious problematic GPU,
the Eagle OC.
Its average clocks are far lower than they should be.
We're gonna put a pin in that for now though,
and move on to the 5700 series,
where we see some very odd behavior as well.
We wanna keep a particularly close eye
on the performance of this Sapphire Pulse card.
Now, there are a few factors
that determine the boost clock speed of a card.
The main ones are the type of work the card is performing,
the quality of the silicon and the quality of the cooler.
Now we've standardized our workload for now, Combustor,
and there's no way for us to affect silicon quality.
So the first troubleshooting step
for any underperforming card is to take its temperature.
Maybe it's got a wee little fever, and there it is.
The eagle OC 3060 that we flagged before
is firmly throttling with temps that far exceed any
of our other 3060s.
If we wanted to fix it, getting those temps
under control would be a very good start.
But this is a secondhand buyer's guide
not a GPU repair guide.
So what you need to do is return that thing
and let the seller figure it out.
Now let's turn our attention to the 5700 XTs.
That Sapphire Pulse that had the lower clocks
seems to have its thermals well in check.
So throttling is unlikely.
It also doesn't have clock speeds
that are substantially limited,
which seems to rule out the possibility
that our seller was using a modified BIOS optimized
for mining.
Stuff like this is why Combustor can only
be considered a quick and dirty tool.
So for this one, we are gonna need to go a little bit deeper
and look at the amazing new underwear on lttstore.com.
Oh, and also at some real world games.
We settled on six games at three resolutions
and at risk of spoiling the conclusion a little bit here,
the vast majority of our results were neck
and neck with our control cards.
Now, the lab hasn't defined specific values yet
for what counts as equal,
but we figure for the purposes of this video, 58-60 FPSs,
that's gonna be an imperceptible difference.
So as long as our mining GPUs managed to be 97%
or higher than the control card,
we're calling them in spec.
Starting with the 3080s,
interestingly enough, once we averaged out our results,
we noticed that we had a problem with our control GPU.
While its average frame rates were fine,
we found that its lows were lower than our mining GPUs,
which is gonna manifest as stuttering
and choppy animations during demanding sections of the game.
Kind of funny that the lightly used card ended up
being the borked one here.
We'll talk a little bit more about that later.
For now, the similarities
between our mining cards are still enough
for us to demonstrate that they at least are fine,
Or in the case of our EVGA model, a bit more than fine.
I miss you already, EVGA.
For the 3070s, we see every card performing
as expected with little to no variance across our samples,
and we've got similar results
with the 3060s except for the Ventus 2X,
which landed a little below our expectations.
Thankfully, it looks like this one was pretty easy
to explain and rectify.
Our Ventus targets clock speeds
that are about 3% lower than our reference card
and when lightly over clocked, it easily comes back in line.
Now, it is possible that the reason
for this lower target clock speed is
that the silicon is slightly degraded, but it's more likely
that this particular card just wasn't as good
from the start.
I'm gonna give it a pass.
As for the 5700 XTs, our sapphire pulse ended up performing
just fine in real world applications.
What a relief.
"But wait," some of you are screaming
"We know the cores are fine.
What about the VRAM Linus?
You need to test the VRAM."
So we did.
We used IDA 64's GPU benchmark to see
if the modules have lost any performance
or started throwing errors, and every single card looks good
except the Eagle OC, rest in peace.
Get your money back for this one.
Unless you can't for some reason.
In that case, can we save the Eagle OC?
Sadly, no.
There are some things that can be overcome.
A bad fan can be replaced, a bad Tim can be replaced.
- Hey!
- And if a mining BIOS has been flashed, for example
the folks over
at Tech PowerUp have an amazing database of GPU BIOSes
that you can simply use to flash a stock one back
onto your card, bada bing, bada boom.
But if you encounter artifacting
which looks a little something like this
or outright errors like we just saw,
the cold hard truth is that you probably cannot do anything
which means then that there is some truth
to the warnings you've seen about used cards
whether it's intentional or not, there are people
out there trying to sell broken GPUs as working ones.
But I still disagree with a lot of the points
made by my fellow members of the media.
Let's work through them together.
First, the idea that you will suffer some kind
of performance shortfall from the heavy use
of mining was always silly and portrayed
a fundamental misunderstanding
of how these products even work.
In some ways, the heating and then cooling cycles,
not to mention the higher clock speeds that are typical
in gaming workloads are more damaging to a GPU.
So a heavily mined on GPU could fail,
but then so could a lightly gamed on one,
and until either of them does,
it will work as well as the other.
And now that you're armed
with the tools that you need to weed out the bad
from the good, GPUs follow a very similar failure pattern
to other electronics, meaning
that the lemons usually die within weeks
or months of manufacture within their warranty period.
And those non lemons tend to live long
and happy lives until they really, really don't.
The next misconception that I've seen thrown around is
that not purchasing used cards is somehow
like sticking it to crypto miners.
And while I fully support withholding demand
until prices fall to acceptable levels
a stubborn refusal to buy one at all can only lead
to two possible outcomes.
Either someone else will buy them,
or they will be scrapped as e-waste to avoid storing them.
I mean, I get the anger, but by not purchasing a used GPU,
you're not only depriving yourself
of something that you want,
you're potentially encouraging more harm to the environment.
From my point of view, every non obsolete GPU that is not
in a gaming PC is a brand new GPU
that needs to be manufactured in its place.
And if you think about it buying new
are you really morally superior?
Your purchase encourages large money grubbing corporations
to keep producing more GPUs
out of our dwindling rare earth minerals.
And these are the same big corporations
that happily dropshipped literal tons
of GPUs to large scale mining facilities,
reaping record high profits during the pandemic.
But like (beep) scalpers, right?
Guys, Nvidia and AMD
were the biggest scalpers of all,
leaving us at the point then we're the only moral thing
to do is to simply not purchase a GPU at all.
But come on, what are we gonna do?
Not play "Modern Warfare II"?
So the right thing to do would be be
to purchase a used GPU then?
I mean, only you can say.
I've long grappled with my effect on increasing consumerism
and how my very existence encourages some
of the worst aspects of capitalism.
But in my defense,
I've also always been an outspoken advocate
of keeping older hardware IN service rather
than buying things that you don't need.
Maybe it's because I believe in the importance
of the first two Rs.
You know, the reuse and reduce ones.
Or maybe it's because I'm just a cheapskate.
Maybe it's that I'm lucky enough to be able
to afford to gamble on used products
But in the grand scheme of things,
even if they do fail every once in a while
I don't see how you can afford not to buy used.
I mean, considering that we weren't being particularly savvy
with our purchases, we didn't haggle, we didn't bid
on auctions, we just bought whatever was available
for asking price and then compared it
to buying new at the time, and we still saved about 22%.
That is not too shabby.
Even if you removed the price of our broken GPU
from that calculation, our savings are still 18.5%
compared to if we bought this stuff new.
Again, we could have saved more money
with patience and haggling.
But as for whether it makes sense for you,
it's gonna depend on your risk tolerance.
But like, come on, everything's a risk
except buying a GPU with a transferable warranty
by the way.
Look, RIP EVGA.
And anyway, I'll tell you this much.
As someone who's been Hands on with more computer hardware
than most people will ever even lay eyes on,
I've seen brand new stuff die for no reason.
just as often as I've seen secondhand pieces
of crap survive a brutal drop.
Life is a crapshoot,
and then you die.
Just like I killed the original segue we had
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If you like this video, why not check out our video
about the benchmarking automation
that allowed this project to happen?
It's actually come a long way
since then because we had to work
on it a lot to actually do all these benchmarks.
But the basic idea's there.