One of the most questions people asked is whether bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency mining will damage my GPU or not.
Is there any harm in the long term or short term harm to my Graphic card?
In this article, I will talk about if and when damage will occur to your graphic card.
Table of Contents
Will Mining Damage a Graphic Card?
If you are doing bitcoin mining with your graphic card, the main reason for damage will be overclocking your pc or adding many mods. If you do this incorrectly, it might cause damage to your graphic card.
Overclocking your PC
Overclocking is not bad if you do it correctly. Most of the miners overclock or under volt their pc, but it has to be done correctly.
Overclocking is used to boost your pc so that you can earn some extra money from mining. Also, overclocking helps to increase gaming performance.
How to Avoid GPU Overheating
If your graphic card gets overheated, it is a serious problem and might damage your graphic card.
So to avoid GPU overheating, you can do some tasks to lower down your heat.
Below is the list of things you can do to protect your graphic card while mining:
- Lower the GPU power consumption.
- Clean graphic cards every 3-5 months.
- Add a small fan next to your graphic card.
- Thermal paste replacement
Lower the GPU Power Consumption
This will surely shorten the GPU life if your graphic card runs above 80°C or even 90°C for a longer time while bitcoin mining.
To prevent this, you can lower your GPU power consumption.
MSI Afterburner is one of the most popular overclocking tools. This tool will help you to lower your GPU power consumption.
Lower down your power limit in afterburner software. You should keep your power limit between 70%-80%.
Clean Graphic Card Every 3-5 Months
Every graphic card gets dust on the fan after mining. Because of the dust, the graphic card fan gets slow, and it’s not able to cool your GPU.
You should clean your graphic card every three months.
You can clean with a painting brush or open a fan of a graphic card.
While opening a fan, do it properly, or else you might damage your fan.
As you see, I have damaged my graphic card while disassembling a fan, so be careful while you disassemble your graphic card.
Add Small Fan Next To Your Graphic Card
To avoid heating problems, you can also put a small table fan next to your computer.
I use a table fan next to my computer while mining.
The temperatures dropped by 3 to 5 degrees when I turned on my table fan.
Thermal Paste Replacement
It’s my personal experience that long hours of mining might affect the thermals of a graphic card.
You will see the higher temperature on a GPU after six months of heavy mining.
So to solve this problem you can do replacement of thermal paste.
If you want to replace thermal paste of gpu watch this video:
Conclusion
I have started using my gaming PC for some mining when I am not using it, and I have found that when mining with the GPU and CPU, I have not seen much of an issue, in that I can still open webpages, watch youtube videos, check emails, etc. without any issues.
Mining problems occur when you incorrectly do overclock, or else your graphic cards have dust.
To solve the problem, ask a professional about overclocking, clean graphic cards every month if possible, add thermal paste, and you can use a table fan.
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