As crypto crashes, used mining GPUs with defective memory being sold without war...

As crypto crashes, used mining GPUs with defective memory being sold without warning

via Zvelo

In the current market, it probably hasn't been a good time for you if you are a cryptocurrency investor. And for crypto-miners, it has been just as bad if not worse. Following such events, there has been a sudden flooding of used mining GPUs which miners are trying to get rid of. And although a lot of these miners tend to undervolt their GPUs for the best efficiency, it's still generally not recommended you get a used mined card unless you can get it for really bargain basement prices.

As such, some gamers find it irresistible to miss out on what looks like a deal and one such user on the Chinese NGA forum found out the hard way that their RTX 3080 wasn't what it was supposed to be.

The user bought a used MSI Suprim X RTX 3080 10GB model but soon found out that the card, instead of having the full 10GB memory across its 320-bit memory bus, was only equipped with 8GB memory across a 256-bit bus. In turn the memory bandwidth of the card has also been reduced from 760.3GB/s to less than 610GB/s.

Hence, it looks like during previous mining operations a 2GB memory module on the card went bad which was disabled. Since mining can generally be done on cards with more than 4GB of VRAM, the new modified 8GB RTX 3080 would have worked out quite well with a minimal loss to performance.

Be careful out there folks.

Source and images: UID38680374 (NGA forum) via Wccftech