Many of us have wondered whether graphics cards used for mining over a prolonged period offer worse performance in games compared to a brand new card. Although the answer to this question largely depends on the conditions the card was kept in while mining such as temperature, power draw, and the cooling solution used, thanks to a video uploaded by Testing Games, we can get a rough idea of how the performance of a GPU is affected after 18 months of intensive mining:
As you can see in the above table, although the RTX 2080 Ti used for mining is slightly slower, the deltas are marginal at best. It’s likely that the drop in performance was the result of some of the components such as the VRAM, VRM and most likely even the GPU die heating up due to the deterioration of the thermal pads and paste.
Unfortunately, the video doesn’t contain any info regarding the in-game clocks of the two cards, making it hard to make a definitive conclusion. Regardless, these deltas can be easily erased by overclocking the used GPU or simply by replacing the thermal paste and pads. This more or less proves that graphics cards used for mining cryptocurrency can be used for gaming even after years of punishment.
