加密货币成为主要货币以后_从加密货币矿工那里购买二手GPU是否安全？

加密货币成为主要货币以后

Thank God, the cryptocurrency bubble finally seems to be bursting. It had gotten so ridiculous that GPUs were skyrocketing in cost. But now, you’re about to see a bunch of powerful secondhand graphics cards flood the market, as Bitcoin “miners” try to recoup some of that cost.

感谢上帝，加密货币泡沫终于似乎破裂了。它是如此荒谬，以至于GPU的价格飞涨。但是现在，随着比特币“矿工”试图收回部分成本，您将看到一堆功能强大的二手图形卡涌入市场。

High-end cards are already starting to fall back to their normal prices on secondary markets like eBay and Craigslist, but is it safe to buy these cards after they’ve been sitting in a 24/7 crypto-miner for months, or maybe even years?

在eBay和Craigslist等二级市场上，高端卡已经开始跌回其正常价格，但是在24/7加密矿工中坐了几个月甚至是几十年之后，可以安全地购买这些卡吗？年份？

Broadly speaking, the answer is “yes.” While buying secondhand graphics cards from Bitcoin miners carries a few inherent risks, they’re not really greater than the risks of buying used parts in the first place. Let’s break it down.

从广义上讲，答案是“是”。虽然从比特币矿工那里购买二手图形卡存在一些固有的风险，但它们的风险并没有比最初购买二手零件的风险大。让我们分解一下。

GPU不是汽车 (A GPU Is Not a Car)

It’s tempting to think of electronic components as having a shelf life, and that after a certain amount of use it’s dangerous to keep them without replacement. But that’s not really true—old electronics can work for decades without issue, as long as they don’t have moving parts and aren’t exposed to extreme conditions outside of their operating standards. For example, I used to drive trains with computerized logging systems that had been in continual operation for fifty years.

容易想到电子部件具有保质期，并且在经过一定数量的使用后，将其保存而不更换是很危险的。但这并不是真的-旧的电子设备只要没有移动部件并且不承受超出其操作标准的极端条件，就可以连续工作数十年。例如，我曾经使用连续运行了五十年的计算机记录系统来驱动火车。

Now, it’s true that PC components wear out eventually. Hard drives are the obvious example here—if you’re not planning for your drive to fail, then eventually you’re going to be caught by surprise. But graphics cards are a little different. While they do fail on occasion, they’re more prone to failure soon after installation due to a weakness of the incredibly complex chip fabrication process than being “worn out” by regular use. This is the lemon phenomenon in action: a GPU or CPU that works fine past its warranty period is probably going to keep going for several years, at least. The engineering term “bathtub curve” is applicable here.

现在，PC组件最终会磨损。硬盘驱动器是此处的明显示例-如果您不打算使驱动器发生故障，那么最终您将被意外所吸引。但是图形卡有所不同。尽管它们有时确实会发生故障，但由于难以置信的复杂的芯片制造Craft.io的弱点，它们比常规使用“破旧”的情况更容易在安装后出现故障。这实际上是柠檬现象：在保修期内可以正常工作的GPU或CPU至少要保持几年的使用寿命。工程术语“浴缸曲线”在此处适用。

As a result, you could view graphics cards that have been in mining rigs for some time as already past the breaking-in point of its electronic life. So long as it hasn’t been unreasonably overclocked, overheated, or physically damaged, it’s probably alright in terms of reliability.

因此，您可以查看已经在采矿设备中使用了一段时间的图形卡，而这些图形卡已经超过了其电子生活的起点。只要它没有受到不合理的超频，过热或物理损坏，就可靠性而言可能还不错。

Speaking of which…

说到…

矿工对硬件的要求不如您想像的高 (Miners Aren’t as Hard on Their Hardware as You Think)

It’s true that the point of a cryptocurrency mining rig is to constantly number-crunch, day-in and day-out, in the elusive search for sweet, sweet hash. If that sentence doesn’t make any sense to you, let me save you a lot of reading and just say this: Bitcoin miners turn electricity into digital money with math, and they do that math with graphics cards.

的确，在难以捉摸的甜蜜哈希搜索中，加密货币挖掘装备的重点是不断地日复一日地进行数字运算。如果那句话对您没有任何意义，请让我为您节省很多阅读量，然后这样说：比特币矿工用数学将电转化为数字货币，而他们使用图形卡进行数学运算。

But that simplified explanation is enough to make an important point. Mining for cryptocurrency is about processing power, certainly—that’s why the distributed chip designs of GPUs are better for most methods of mining than CPUs. But it’s also about efficiency: if a miner uses so much electricity that it’s eating up electric bills faster than it’s solving hashes and generating coins, then it’s actually losing money for the owner. Mining has now become a balancing act, between choosing the most profitable version of cryptocurrency, having the most computational power available, and using that power to its maximum benefit without draining more electricity than a Wal-Mart freezer aisle.

但是，这种简化的解释足以说明重点。当然，加密货币的挖掘与处理能力有关，这就是为什么GPU的分布式芯片设计在大多数挖掘方法中都比CPU更好的原因。但这也关系到效率：如果一个矿工消耗的电量如此之多，以至于它消耗电费的速度比解决哈希和产生硬币的速度快，那么它实际上是在为所有者亏钱。在选择最赚钱的加密货币版本，拥有最大的计算能力以及最大程度地利用该功率而不消耗比沃尔玛冰柜过道更多的电力之间，采矿现已成为一种平衡。

To that effect, Bitcoin miners are actually more likely to undervolt their GPUs than overclock them, if they even bother to do any modifications to their software setup at all. There’s less benefit for a six-GPU mining rig being overclocked than a single GPU in a gaming PC. Bitcoin miners are much more concerned with efficiency than screaming polygon-pushing power, so the idea of them running a card until it melts really doesn’t hold up.

为此，即使比特币矿工甚至根本不愿意对其软件设置进行任何修改，实际上他们对GPU的破坏也比对其超频的可能性更大。与游戏PC中的单个GPU相比，六GPU采矿设备超频带来的好处要少。比特币矿工比尖叫多边形推动力更关心效率，因此他们运行卡直到卡融化的想法确实没有成立。

Plus, GPUs are engineered to run hot. An average GPU will reach temperatures between 50c and 70c while it’s under heavy load, and it can keep this up for hours or days without issue.

此外，GPU经过精心设计可热运行。在重负载下，普通GPU的温度将达到50c至70c，并且可以将其维持数小时或数天而不会出现问题。

With all that in mind, we wouldn’t worry too much. In fact, it’s entirely possible that a card bought new and used for a couple of years by a heavy gamer is going to be less reliable than one used for mining, if the user overclocked it hard and treated it less-than-nicely.

考虑到所有这些，我们不会太担心。实际上，如果用户超频并对其进行的处理不甚恰当，那么由重型游戏玩家购买并使用了几年的卡完全有可能不如用于采矿的卡可靠。

您可能需要更换一些风扇 (You Might Have to Replace Some Fans)

There is one moving part on a modern graphics card: the cooling fan. And since the fans on mining rigs are on at a constant rate more or less all of the time, it’s possible that the electrical motors or bearings in those fans might be considerable weaker and more prone to failure in a card used for mining than in a more typical secondhand card.

现代图形卡上有一个运动部件：冷却风扇。而且由于采矿设备上的风扇始终处于恒定速率，因此风扇中的电动机或轴承可能会比用于采矿的卡弱得多，并且更容易发生故障。更典型的二手卡。

But this, too, isn’t all that big of a deal. Most of the major card series have aftermarket fans and liquid cooling options available to them, especially the mainstream mid-range and high-end cards popular among cryptocurrency miners. If the fans on your used card give out, it’s an easy thing to replace—if you’ve ever installed a CPU cooler, you should be able to handle it without any problems. You could even take the opportunity to upgrade to a liquid cooling system, or pick up a broken version of the same card and harvest its factory cooler.

但这也没什么大不了的。大多数主要的卡系列都具有售后爱好者和液体冷却选项，尤其是在加密货币矿工中流行的主流中档和高端卡。如果用过的卡上的风扇散发出去，则很容易更换-如果您已经安装了CPU散热器，则应该能够毫无问题地处理它。您甚至可以借此机会升级到液体冷却系统，或者拿起同一张卡的损坏版本并获得其工厂冷却器。

In fact, graphics cards that come from dusty environments—or just from former owners who didn’t properly clean their PC cases often enough—are probably just as prone to fan failure as former mining cards.

实际上，来自尘土飞扬的环境的图形卡，或者只是来自那些经常没有适当清洁PC机壳的前所有者而来的图形卡，很可能像以前的采矿卡一样容易出现风扇故障。

购买二手货总是有风险，因此您仍应当心 (Buying Used Always Has Risks, So You Should Still Be Careful)

So we’ve established that used graphics cards from mining rigs aren’t especially bad picks, at least in terms of used hardware. But they’re still, you know…used hardware. Buying used it a great way to save money (and something you should probably do more often!), but it does have its own set of risks, too.

因此，我们已经确定，至少在二手硬件方面，采矿设备中使用的图形卡并不是特别不好的选择。但是，它们仍然是，您知道...使用过的硬件。购买是一种省钱的好方法(而且您可能应该更经常这样做！)，但是它也有自己的风险。

When you buy used, you generally want to have something guaranteeing your purchase. eBay/PayPal and its built-in buyer protection is a good example, and Amazon is generally a good place to pick up used goods, since vendors don’t want to risk jeopardizing accounts with repeated reports from unhappy buyers.

当您购买二手货时，通常希望得到一些保证您购买的商品。 eBay / PayPal及其内置的买家保护就是一个很好的例子，亚马逊通常是拾起二手商品的好地方，因为卖家不愿冒着买家不满的反复举报而危及账户的风险。

User-to-user markets tend to be cheaper than both these options, but they’re also more risky: if you spend $250 on a bum graphics card on Craigslist or Facebook, there’s little option for recompense. Caveat emptor, as always. It might also be worth looking for newer cards: in addition to better power and efficiency at all price levels, some manufacturers like EVGA, Gigabyte, and MSI allow warranties to transfer between owners. They’ll replace dud cards based on serial numbers so long as the purchase date is within the warranty period.

用户到用户市场往往比这两个选项都便宜，但它们也更具风险：如果您在Craigslist或Facebook上花了250美元在流浪汉图形卡上，则几乎没有补偿的选择。请一如既往地告诫。也许还值得寻找更新的卡：除了在所有价格水平上都具有更好的电源和效率之外，EVGA，技嘉和MSI等制造商还允许在所有者之间转移保修。只要购买日期在保修期内，他们就会根据***替换旧卡。

That being said, if cryptocurrency markets continue to bust as they have in the early part of this year, there are going to be some really fantastic deals to be had for anyone looking for a new GPU. It’s possible that the secondary market could get so flooded that even new cards go under their recommended retail prices for the first time in a long time. After a bleak few months of hardware shortages, it’ll be a welcome change for PC gamers everywhere.

话虽如此，如果加密货币市场继续像今年年初那样破产，那么对于那些寻求新GPU的人来说，将会有一些非常奇妙的交易。二级市场可能会泛滥成灾，以至于新卡在很长一段时间内首次都低于建议零售价。在几个月的硬件短缺惨淡之后，这对世界各地的PC游戏玩家来说都是可喜的变化。

Image credit: Newegg, Toyota, Wikimedia, ezphoto/Shutterstock

图片来源： Newegg ， Toyota ， Wikimedia ， ezphoto / Shutterstock

翻译自: https://www.howtogeek.com/342079/is-it-safe-to-buy-used-gpus-from-cryptocurrency-miners/