One of the most controversial questions in recent years has been whether a graphics card used for mining can impair its gaming performance. The YouTube channel Testing Games has decided to make a comparison of two RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards in video games, a completely new card and another that was used for mining.
The RTX 2080 Ti used for mining has a usage time of a year and a half, which makes it perfect to be able to check if that punishment of hours and hours of uninterrupted use can affect in any way the performance when it is used for games.
Some of the games that were tested are Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, Battlefield V, or Forza Horizon 4.
In the video, it can be clearly seen that punishment of more than a year and a half of use in cryptocurrency mining affects performance in video games, with a frame rate that falls between 10 and 20% depending on the game. For example, in Forza Horizon 4 this performance drops by up to 20%, or in Battlefield V where the reduction is 10%.
The test equipment was the i9-10900K under an MSI MPG Z490 GAMING PLUS motherboard, which also equips with a 32GB 3600 MHz RAM.
What this comparison shows is that long periods of mining can accelerate the wear and tear of the components of a graphics card, such as the cooling system (fans) and, possibly, the silicon itself. The RTX 2080 Ti that had been used for mining was heating up about 16 degrees above the new model. This also dropped the clock speed by about 100 MHz under full load.
The only controversial point in this comparison is that the thermal pads of the RTX 2080 Ti used for mining have not been replaced. It would have been interesting to see the performance of the two graphics cards at the same clock speed. However, a decrease of 100 MHz is not enough for the performance to drop by 10-20%. We will keep you informed.
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