Citation needed?

My understanding was that gaming cards are pushed far harder, at higher temps, with fluctuating power and thermals, which causes more issues than a single stable power limit and temperature

Where is your understanding coming from? There is no such thing as pushing cards “far harder, at higher temps” than when mining or doing other compute tasks that run the GPU at 100%. Failure rates land squarely on the side of higher temps, and the reasons are well understood https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/444474/can-i...

You might be thinking of spinning disk drives rather than GPUs. A lot of people suggest that leaving an HDD powered up and spinning is better than spinning up and down frequently, due to the temperature going up and down a lot and the added wear on this mechanical device. This is completely different from a GPU though.

Higher temps are bad, but thermal cycles are equally bad or worse. Different things on the card have different thermal coefficients of expansion. Getting warm and cooling makes everything flex and stresses solder joints, wire bonds, and thermal interfaces.

Miner cards have longer, sustained high temps. This is bad for life.

Gamer cards have lots of thermal cycles. This is very bad for life.

Miner cards are more likely to be undervolted to improve power efficiency and thermals. This is good for life. (Lower peak temperature, less electromigration).

Gamer cards are more likely to be overvolted and overclocked to improve peak performance. This is very bad for life. (higher peak temperatures, more electromigration).

https://www.dfrsolutions.com/hubfs/Resources/services/Temper...

That’s testing for thermal cycling over wide temperature ranges or longer lifespans. GPU’s are used indoors and don’t have a very long lifespan.

The major risk factor for GPU’s is electromigration which is a major factor in GPU lifespan and directly relates to usage. A 40 hour a week gamer is extremely rare, but a mining GPU is pulling 168 hours a week.

Electromigration is a small risk factor in any kind of reasonable life. Especially if not overvolted (which is something that mostly gamers do-- miners are more likely to undervolt).

Solder fatigue breaking of solder balls is common. I have fixed lots of GPUs by reflowing them. GPUs do cycle over a large temperature range-- delta-T can be 50C+. While maps are loading, etc, you can have delta-T's of 25C+ every few minutes.

Indeed, you have lots of people doing this:

https://turbofuture.com/computers/How-to-Fix-a-Dead-Graphics... https://www.instructables.com/How-to-repair-your-Graphics-Ca... https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Temporarily+Repair+a+Lost+Cause...

This is a thermal cycling induced failure mode. (Of course, a home oven doesn't accomplish proper reflow, so this is more of a "fix things for a couple months" trick as described in the posts).

As all of those links mention it’s useful for a minority of dead cards as most are failing from other causes.

That said, specific manufacturers can always introduce defects so your mileage may vary.

I strongly disagree. The dominant failure modes of electronics these days are:

A) solder joint failure (thermal cycling) B) capacitor failure (sustained heat).

Electromigration is a distant, end-of-life condition-- representing only a tiny fraction of failures of non-overvolted devices in a normal use period.

As your link itself says, in the top answer:

"But then there is an important question: How much does this decrease the lifespan? Knowing this, should you make sure that your graphics card stays cool all the time? My guess is no, unless an error was made at the design stage. Circuits are designed with these worst-case situations in mind, and made such that they will survive if they are pushed to the limits for the rated lifetime of the manufacturer. "

Mining cards are run near always, while gaming cards are usually pushed only a small number of hours per day.

I have no data to back this up but anecdotally this makes a huge difference in wear.

GPUs are not mechanical parts (well save for the fans but those can be replaced). I would imagine thermal stress from heating and cooling would be the biggest issue - you don't get that under constant load.

Heat = bad for silicon. Also electromigration. And probably a couple other effects I don't know about.

Heat is bad, but MTTF at usually achievable temperatures is hundreds or thousands of years.

Electromigration matters on the order of 100 years.

Well, tell that to my chipset's SATA controllers (Sandbridge generation).

Intel messed up their life expectancy calculations, and thus they died after 2~3 years. I think 2 are still alive.

The Sandy Bridge SATA issue did make big waves back then and Intel did a recall IIRC.

Only the B2 stepping of chipsets should be affected by this tough.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/4142/intel-discovers-bug-in-6...

https://techreport.com/news/20326/intel-finds-flaw-in-sandy-...

I guess I should have gotten a replacement board.

I'll probably just upgrade to Zen3 soon, so it'd not be worth the effort (the machine in question is off and in storage).

Looks like you should have put a fan on that chipset. Like your GPU, which runs at extreme temperatures for extended periods of time!

It was cooled by the OEM config. And the chipset did get nice airflow.

Huge difference in wear, yes. But not in the direction you think, I think. Warming up an cooling down is more damaging for a card than running constant temperature. It 'jiggles' parts more.

With ETH you underclock core and overclock memory. Core will lead to vastly lower power consumption, while still maintaining hashrate.