Things have stirred lately with Chinas ban on crypto mining and many used GPUs will flow the market probably. But should you buy a used GPU?
Short answer: NO, long answer: keep on reading to find out why.
GPU shortage and its cause
As you all know by now, we live sadly in a world struck by a global Pandemic. Due to this awful disease and measures taken against it, many people are either working from home or are at home making the manufacturing of new chips problematic while demand on the market has raised.
Throw into that mix crypto mining which has raised in popularity and you have, well today's market where we have GPU shortage.
Now with the latest news that China has banned the mining of cryptocurrency, there is to be expected that at some point in time mining cards used there will fit the market in the whole world.
Sadly even with a large quantity of GPUs that will become available, the overall price of cards will not be much lowered I am afraid since demand is still very high and many people would not want to purchase used mining cards and neither should you.
Be prepared for the worst scenario
Although this sounds very pessimistic and in most cases, it will not turn out to be true, you should always prepare yourself mentally that you might be in that lower percentage that will end up with a really bad GPU.
What has come up to be absolutely true when considering GPU that were mining is that if anything at all can be done to GPU in order to increase performance, it has been done. Miners want to optimize and almost every GPU if could be overclocked, it was overclocked.
Extensive mining also means that thermal paste has been dried and it is pretty useless at this point and there is a very high chance that fans and heat sinks will need much cleaning or even replacement raising the price of the card itself for mentioned paste, fans, and heat sinks.
There's no way to tell what the previous owner might have done with a graphics card when you're shopping online, so our advice is to assume the worst. Don't trust the seller to give truthful information. Any listing that says it was "never used for mining" at this point is probably a lie.
Age of the GPU matters
Date when GPU itself has manufactured really matters. Newer cards even if used extensively have been used for a much shorter period of time and are not so damaged were ones produced a few years ago have seen a lot of action.
Let’s say that you get RTX 3060, In the worst-case scenario it has been mining since late February of 2021 and basically, it is still under warranty so it should behave OK and put some good work in gaming even in that state.
On another hand, if we take for example GTX 1080Ti which is 4 years old GPU things start to change drastically. 4 years GPU could be worn out even if it was used just for extensive gaming sessions let alone for mining.
No return policy and seller rating
Most of the time you will run into a product that cannot be returned or no refunds policy. This should bring a red flag right away and deter you from purchase.
Sellers with the highest ratings are more trustworthy since many of them will not want to destroy their reputation but these will probably not even have these kinds of merchandise in their store.
Buying with a poor rating seller and no return policy on a product is just asking for trouble. And although some stores do have arbitration and will stand on the customer side there is no guarantee for that and it will take too much time to process.
If you really must buy a second-hand GPU
Of course in these troubled times sometimes due to malfunction or any other reason, there would not be another choice than to buy a second-hand GPU.
In this case, if there is no other option consider sellers with many positive ratings. If you can buy locally that would even be better or the best-case scenario would be if you could visually see and inspect GPU itself in order to see in what state it is.
Look for warranty stickers to see if they are thorn and the card has been tampered with. Also take a good look at screws, if they have scratches card has been opened, probably to replace fan or heating sinks which means that it has worked a lot.
Conclusion
It is very difficult to give the best possible advice on this situation since of GPU shortage, but I would much prefer a new GPU with lower performance than a hi-performance one which was mining.
icon in your Windows taskbar or the macOS menu bar.)
Select the Account icon in the upper right, and then select Sign out.
In the confirmation dialog box, select Sign Out. The Creative Cloud apps and services associated with your account are deactivated on the computer.
Sign in again to your Adobe account.
Launch any Creative Cloud app included in your membership, such as Photoshop or Illustrator. If prompted, sign-in on the next screen.
When the settings window opens, choose ACCOUNTS on it.
Windows will then go to the accounts settings page. Within that page, click on the Family & other users to open the setting for the chosen section on right. On the right settings, screen navigate to the lower section and click once with the left button on add someone else to this PC
When add someone else to this PC is clicked, pop up window will appear which will ask you to provide the persons email address and later on the password of his/her Microsoft account, after the required information is provided you are done, a new user has been added and he can use his Microsoft credentials on the login screen to use this computer.
This will open yet another pop-up giving you the option to create a Microsoft account for this person, to use a phone number instead of a Microsoft account, or to create a new email address for the user. Any of these options will create a new user for this computer with provided credentials but there is the last option at bottom of the pop-up which will allow you to create a local user only without a Microsoft account. This user will be able to use this computer, will not be able to transfer his document through various devices like he/she would if using a valid Microsoft account but it could use the computer and personalize it fully to his/her liking.
Once the link is clicked, you will be presented with a floating window requiring you to input needed information in order for the account to be created. You will need to provide username, password, and answers to 3 security questions.
Once all information has been provided, click on next and your new non-Microsoft local user has been created. Now when you click on Family & other users you will see that Windows has added a new user with the provided name to this computer. If you wish, you can add another user in the same manner, following the previous steps. Microsoft Windows does not have a limit for how many users can be on one computer so feel free to create as many as you like.
Click on Change account type.
Under account type, you will have the option to promote this user to an administrator if you wish or you can leave it as a standard user. 