author: Kamil Komaniecki
RTX 2080 Ti Up to 20% Slower After Cryptomining
After a year and a half of cryptomining, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti can be up to 20% weaker than the new card. What are the reasons for the reduced performance?
It has not been known for a long time that cryptomining strongly affects the consumption of GPUs. However, probably few people expected that it can have such a large impact on the performance of our card. The Testing Games channel on YouTube decided to check, using RTX 2080 Ti as an example, how much wear and tear a GPU is subjected to during long-term operation, serving as a Bitcoin (BTC) or Ethereum (ETH) miner. In this case, the card was used for almost a year and a half. The GPU was paired with a very powerful Intel Core i9-10900K processor.
The card was tested in games like Cyberpunk 2077, Battlefield V and Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4K resolution, where its performance was on average 10% lower than a brand new RTX 2080 Ti. Quite a surprise, right? An even bigger difference was in the case of Forza Horizon 4, where the difference reached 20% compared to previously unused unit. This is a very large drop.
As the reason for such reduced performance, the channel points to high GPU temperatures, which were on average 14-16 degrees Celsius higher than the new RTX 2080 Ti. This was reflected in the clock speed, which recorded a drop in frequency by more than 100 MHz. This is where Nvidia's GPU Boost 4.0 algorithm comes into play, which is also dependent on the temperature of our card. The higher it is, the lower the clock, and consequently the performance. It also works the other way around.
Why shouldn't you buy a GPU after it was used for cyrptomining? As the test shows, it can not only shorten the life of our hardware but also affect its performance. In this situation, it would probably be enough to clean the dust on the heatsink and apply a new thermal conductive paste, which loses its properties with such a long and quite heavy use. Nevertheless, it can be easily noticed that buying used cards from miners, of which there's a plenty on auction sites, one should be prepared for the problems described above.