> 2nd market GPUs from crypto or ai is the sweet spot of ~10-20% discount on ebay

I thought those were iffy because they were run so hard? If not, I need to go shopping:)

This is a myth. I ran 150k AMD gpus. We overclocked/undervolted all of them. While they were run continuously "hard", they didn't fail. Some of them ran for years out in containers in the middle of dusty fields through 4 seasons. They don't burn out the way that people think they might.

That said, a lot of the GPUs used for crypto, don't apply to AI, unless you really want to be constrained. Just be super aware of what you're buying and what you plan to use it for.

Electronics (within spec) don't usually mind heat, thermal cycling is what they really hate.

The system I built would auto tune the GPUs. The failure case for a single GPU is to crash the entire system and there are 12 in a box. The machines would reboot hundreds of times until they were tuned to stability. Through 4 seasons (including snow). Again, we had the majority of these cards with zero failures, across multiple years.

The things that were more likely to fail were things like PSU's. One time we had a bad batch of those and had to replace nearly every one of them. We cracked a few open and they were clearly hand soldered by someone in China and shorting out internally due to failed connections. We would see a lot more thermal cycling failure from that than we would from a GPU card that was pick&place assembled by a machine with solder paste.

Can I ask what this was for? I'm struggling to think what you'd be doing in the middle of a field with a crate full of mostly-GPU compute. Something with machine vision?

Mining ethereum when it was proof of work. The middle of the field was just one location out of 7. We did "real" data centers too.

> Some of them ran for years out in containers in the middle of dusty fields through 4 seasons.

...story time? This sounds more interesting than hardware prices;)

> That said, a lot of the GPUs used for crypto, don't apply to AI, unless you really want to be constrained. Just be super aware of what you're buying and what you plan to use it for.

Yeah, I'll have to do my homework. While AI would be cool, I'm actually largely interested in running video games, but I keep equivocating because I'm a terrible cheapskate:)

The things that will fail, are fans...

Some disagree because almost all miners underclock and run under close to ideal temperature to increase efficiency per watt. So it might turn out to be a deal because it was better treated than a random gamer

They probably ran at a constant temperature too, none of the getting hot then cooling down to fatigue solder joints.

Would you buy a rental car for only a 10-20% discount?

"AI" GPUs like the 3090 and 3060 are starting to shoot up in price, unfortunately.