YouTuber @Iskandar Souza and @PauloGomes investigation found that many sellers of mining cards are not honest, they will be somehow mining cards packaged as “new graphics cards” mixed into the market.
While both high-pressure water gun cleaning and ultrasonic + board wash cleaning are said to descale PCBs, the chip part is not so easy to “revive”. Although some burst GPU cores can be replaced, but this is undoubtedly a significant increase in labor costs. In this case, consumers wanting to buy a good color of the mining card is not easy, and now there are “refurbished” memory chips, again deepening the difficulty of distinguishing.
As the picture shows, the GPU cores of some mining cards can still perform well after a long workout, but the chip parts show a distinct yellowish-brown color, which means the surface is darkened, discolored or melted.
Paulo says that trying to identify a used card requires extremely careful inspection, whether it’s a missing sticker or a scratch from a screwdriver that should make you suspicious. However, even though some cards may appear to be new (including the original warranty sticker, which is free of dust or scratches), there’s still a chance they’re not.
By far the easiest area to spot are the signs of aging on the memory and GPU cores, the yellow parts, but there are always a few traders who like to be clever and have even worked out ways to paint the memory chips to make them look newer than they really are.
The good thing is that this hot paint material can be removed, so the chip color is significantly different from the lower color, which means that this is most likely a “refurbished card”, but this way is certainly a test of the consumer’s hands-on ability, after all, you need to remove the heat sink first to check whether the card is artificially colored traces.
It is worth mentioning that the PCB with the GPU core will also have discoloration problems after a long time of mining, although miners can also be refurbished in this way, but because of the high cost, so few miners will do so, most of these people will only be refurbished for the video memory part.
The yellow marks on the memory and GPU cores may be due to prolonged heating or resoldering, but whatever the cause is, it suggests that this card is not new. paulo also showed a number of examples of what a GPU looks like after mining.
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It is recommended that if consumers do not have certain identification and hands-on skills, it is recommended to buy the graphics card in the official website channels to avoid the problem of second-hand graphics cards “to hand on the waste”, at least there are problems can also be in the official warranty.
