Cryptocurrency began to plummet in April last year, and mining became more and more expensive. Therefore, many miners began to sell mining cards at a loss. A large number of second-hand mining cards appeared on the market. It has been nearly ten months. After such a long time, many people may think that the mining cards should be almost sold out by now, but in fact this is not the case. Recently, a foreign YouTuber It was found that some unscrupulous miners, in order to make the mining card look like new and make people think it is a general second-hand graphics card instead of a mined card, they darken the color of some memory and apply new paint on degraded areas. Therefore, you must be very careful when buying a second-hand graphics card.
Gamers should be careful when buying second-hand graphics cards. Foreign miners have discovered that they have started to paint their cards to make them look like new.
A few days ago, the Brazilian YouTube channel Iskandar Souza uploaded an investigative video of second-hand graphics cards. Paulo said that some second-hand graphics cards now look new, and even have warranty stickers, no dust, and no scratches. In fact, they are all disguised. In fact, these are mining cards. After a mining card undergoes uninterrupted high-speed computing for a long time, the memory and GPU chips will turn yellow. Therefore, normally when buying a second-hand graphics card, you can roughly know the condition of the graphics card by looking here.
The picture below shows the obvious comparison, the one on the right is yellowed:
So does this one:
It seems that many people know this method to determine (after all, if you see yellow, you know that this graphics card has been used for a long time or has been badly damaged), which has led to many serious second-hand mining cards being difficult to sell. There are unscrupulous operators in Brazil who repaint the memory of these mining cards and then sell them to unsuspecting customers.
In order to prove this, they opened these graphics cards directly during the live broadcast, and then removed the paint on the surface of the memory to see the original color:
The one in the lower left corner is the actual condition after the paint has been removed. It is yellowish and not as dark as other memories:
Miners have always used some methods to make graphics cards look newer. However, repainting like this is not an easy task and requires a lot of effort. This is why this practice has not been reported in the past. It is speculated that the cryptocurrency rise was too fierce in 2020 and 2021, and miners spent a lot of money to buy a large number of graphics cards. Unexpectedly, the whole world changed in 2022, and it was difficult to stop the bleeding. Only then did some people start to do this.
Therefore, even though there are not as many second-hand mining cards on the market as last year, it is still recommended to save more and buy a new card to be safer. It is really tiring to check everything in order to buy a graphics card. It should be noted that not all graphics cards with yellowed memory are mining cards, and some may actually be caused by normal use. In addition to yellowing, there are many ways to tell if a graphics card is not new, such as dust accumulation, worn warranty stickers, scratches, oxidation of contacts, etc. These are conditions that only occur after months or years of use.
Full video:
If you really want to buy a second-hand graphics card, it is recommended to go to a trusted store to be safer. If you find some sellers with particularly cheap prices, you should also be wary. Even if it is second-hand, you get what you pay for. Don’t just see a brand-new appearance and assume that it is not a mining card or that it has not been used for a long time. There are too many ways to disguise it now.
Source: KOCPC Chinese