Warning Signs When Buying Used GPUs: How to Detect Defective Video Cards

so today we're going to talk about what to look for when buying a used gpu and we have a couple of examples here this has come about because like the gpu cleaning video we did recently it's become evident that a lot of people are forced to buy used and hopefully you can get a good deal on something but there's an important distinction to be drawn between getting a good deal on something and getting something that doesn't work but was priced in a good way and we do have one viewer who got neither of those things paid 700 dollars they're telling us for an rx 580 which by the way was a 200 to 250 card originally and it doesn't even work so what we're going to do today is go over a couple of the most common failure modes for a second hand video card it is actually okay to buy a second-hand card they can withstand a lot of use but there are some key identifiers to figuring out when a card might be compromised and you should maybe pass on the purchase and that's what we're gonna help with before that this video is brought to you by squarespace squarespace is what we've been using for years to manage our own gamer's nexus store and we've been incredibly happy with the choice squarespace makes ecommerce easy for those interested in starting stores but it also has powerful tools to build all types of websites photo galleries for photographers resume and portfolio sites and small business sites are all easily done through squarespace having built a lot of client websites the old way before running gn full-time we can easily recommend squarespace as a powerful fast solution go to squarespace.com gamersnexus to get 10 off your first purchase with squarespace so we already did the video on cleaning a video card and what kind of benefit that can have when you clean out an older card when you try to bring some life back to something you've had for a while but in this one we're focused more on uh again the things to look for in a failure so as we get into this here's a list of some of the most common or most important failures that we've encountered with some of the rare ones in here too this is what we're going to go through today and our gpu testing at this point dates back probably over a decade we have shelves of dozens and dozens of cards and at some point we've seen one of these issues on the cards and so that's why they're on the list common ones include things like cracked or bad thermal paste which you're not going to see until you maybe test it thermally or open it up you'll also see bad dust buildup or grime and thermal pads and the heatsink and fan and even on the thermal pads as long as you can see into the backplate there's a good chance that you see any grime build up before you buy the card so that's something that's fixable and uh is one of the more common issues you might also run into memory artifact in gpu sag causing separation of the cooler warping or bending of the pcb particularly if it has had a water block or has one now uncommonly or rarely you'll get the space invaders artifacting gpu core frequency locking like if there's a short circuit and it's going into safety mode or if someone overly shorts the shunt resistors you might have the gpu core stuck from a short from the 20 pin connector on the 20 series cards there could also be blown mosfets inductors or caps broken tamper seals potentially indicating a bigger problem tamper seal itself doesn't matter missing screws particularly in the i o area where they often strip and other general physical damage to the cards so that's what we're going to go through so this one's got a couple of obvious problems like this the sawdust and the rust and we'll talk more about that missing screws also and those are are three things you could look for but the least common but most catastrophic type of failure is the one that you can't see before you buy the card so there's a couple things to think about when buying a used video card there's obviously the human factors question so human factors would be stuff that we're not really going to go into today but it's probably the most important it's your judge of their character does the person seem like they're legitimate or like they're gonna disappear as soon as you buy it delete their burner number if you bought it locally and then the card's not gonna work so this judge of character there's how legitimate or valid does the listing on ebay or wherever look and then the pricing versus what you're getting does that make sense but that's all sort of social stuff and we're not going to talk with that hopefully you've got some skills there already for the technical stuff video card failures if you're buying locally like facebook marketplace or craigslist you're probably going to have a better chance of finding someone with a soul who is not going to completely gouge you if you can meet them in person maybe they'll feel bad enough to sell you the card for a price that's reasonable instead of selling you a gtx 1060 for the msrp in 2016 today but if you have to overpay for a card uh at least doing it locally you will be able to force the person into a scenario where you can test it and make sure it works before you buy it and if you can test it the reason that's important we can show with this this is an rtx 3080 it's still a new card but it has a key problem which is that this specific rtx 3080 fails in boot during or just before post when it's trying to initialize v bios this is an issue that is not visible at all physically you you will not be able to see this issue on the card there are no burn marks there's nothing that looks wrong at all as soon as you socket it system won't turn on we'll show that in a little bit and show you what that area looks like this card has different issue but it's a very common failure this one is a card that is artifacting and it's actually it's pretty old what was this that's some what was this thing uh 560 ti i think this looks like a 560 ti so this one's got an issue that we were going to use this card for the cleaning video that we did previously we couldn't because it artifacts so we'll show you what artifact looks like there's also the space invaders issue the space invaders issue was a special type of artifact and that was related to the rtx 20 series and we think it's memory that was later resolved there's another issue related to the 20 series as well and we'll show some old footage of this happening but with our titan v and at least one other card i want to say an rtx 2080 ti we had issues where the frequency was locked at 1300 or so megahertz so like we showed in that set of videos and we'll bring them back up again the problem was the card looks like it's running fine and it actually does boost into 3d clocks sort of but it gets stuck at a low frequency like 500 600 megahertz below where it should be and the reasoning for that specific failure on the 20 series cards that use the 20 pin connector over on the right side of the pcb this is a 1080 ti but it was on the right side of the pcb and it was for the fans on the 20 series it was part of the reference design and part of the fe design as well and what it would do is in installation uh if they bridged two of the pins by crushing them when installing the header it would force the card into a form of safety mode and lock the frequencies this isn't something we discovered until much later when an engineer told us off record so another that's another type of failure and the way to look for these types of failures is basically to use some software so let's do a couple demos so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna go so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna go through the highest priority or severity issues one by one and teach some stuff that might be basic to some of you but first thing if you can test the card either in person or maybe you've purchased it on ebay you have some form of seller or buyer protection rather and with buyer protection you might have a day or two you can run some validation tests and and then choose to send it back if it's not working if at some point you can get the card in a system within a window where you can return it the basic things that i would do to validate it works would be to look at the clock boosting behavior the temperatures some extent you can fix that a little bit though and just overall make sure the car is running as you would expect because there are times it can run but there might be issues later down the line so first thing gpuz is free software highly recommend it it's on tech powerup and uh wizard the developer of it does great work so gpu clock is then you want to look at we're not running anything this is normal this number will be in the maybe 100 to 300 range if it's stuck in 2d clocks uh because of someone overzealously shorting shunts or something but otherwise this is normal on desktop the other numbers you'll look at will be eventually gpu temperature not a whole lot of point looking at them right now in idle but under load they'll become important and then what we're going to do is use some software so in this case i'm going to run just a benchmark application we'll use superposition but you could use your favorite game or something too as long as it's sufficiently demanding and it's not just a two-dimensional rendering okay so with some 3d application running in the background this one's particularly stressful but the goal is going to be looking at the frequency sorry it's hard to read here but we'll look at gps in a moment and we can show some of our frequency over time plots in the past as well but either way frequencies over 1900 megahertz here look into the particular card you're buying it will change generation to generation there's no wide net we can cast sometimes you're looking at 2 400 megahertz uh for sort of the peak range sometimes you're looking at maybe 1400 so either way look up the card specifically or the gpu specifically you're buying and make sure the frequency is somewhere in the range that it should be memory is going to be fixed on basically everything it's what it does uh temperature here i wouldn't really use the superposition readout but it's going to be the same thing as what gpuz is reading and you're going to make sure utilization is something high as well otherwise you're judging the frequency on the wrong scenario so let's close this application all we really cared about was the frequency number and if the gpz was open in the background you can save to a log file as well but you see we were in the 1900s the whole time so this card is doing well and behaving as it should the temperature if you wanted to look at it so a lot of people will spot check temperature never do this as a reviewer as a consumer if you're going to spot check temperature at least let the thing run for about 20 minutes first for it to hit steady state we're just demoing quickly but generally speaking the temperature is going to change card to card it's going to change based on the age and everything else and it's contingent on how much power it's pulling but there are certain safeties and once you're above 90c on like non-new radeon cards then maybe it's time to take the thing apart and repaste it but if it's not absolutely throttling which would be indicated by the way in gpz then you're mostly fine and uh perf cap reason would tell you that so it'll say therm where it says power right now it's a t-h-e-r-m if it's thermally throttling and that's true for memory throttling as well on cards that support that readout so that shows the really super basics of the software we use the software pretty much every day especially when doing gpu reviews there's a lot more to it than this and when doing reviews there's a ton more control and care that has to be applied to getting those numbers but for just making sure the thing you just bought is doing what it should be that approach is fine and obviously you'll want to maybe play some games for a while too to really find any issues now what we'd like to show next is artifacting this one we we do have a card that artifact this is a somewhat common but not super common problem uh however it is common enough that people in the audience there's a good amount of you who have likely seen artifacting before so let's demonstrate what that looks like for those who might not know okay so for this one we had to switch display connectors but it brings me to another point which is that uh some stuff you can look at on used cards obviously is physical damage we'll talk about more of that a little bit later we're starting with sort of the gpu side software side of stuff but uh this card for example looks like perhaps linus handled it before we got it but if you look for physical damage like this might not mean that the card itself is bad you can certainly drop video cards and have them still work fine but it could be indicative of a bigger problem okay so this one should give us artifacts as soon as i start installing drivers i was mistaken we have we have so many older gpus the one we wanted was the hd6870 which i've plugged in now and this one will artifact we'll show you what to look for we're just looking for the hd 6870 drivers and i found a flaw it is a 6000 series and it is the 6800 series but that is not it names strike again oh yes this makes sense this is perfectly logical so here's the example of artifact that we're talking about this can happen from things like bad memory on the card or just from a bad memory overclock you could try to manually tune down the memory below stock and see if that helps and it sometimes does depending on how aggressive the manufacturer was at launch but it's mostly indicative of a problem that isn't necessarily solvable doing a ddu driver clean and reinstall can sometimes help but the problem might come back switching rear i o to a different port can help as well if there's an issue with just that one output and if none of these things fix the artifact in and if down clocking the memory doesn't help by say 50 to 100 megahertz it might be best to seek just a return and a refund on the card or don't buy it if you're in front of the person and you have that luxury a somewhat common issue might be gpu sag this happens naturally but it can get exaggerated with time gps sag is when the video card starts to droop on the far side and can be encountered with a support beam included in some cases actually this is sometimes indicative of a loose back plate or loose mounting at the pcie slot it's not necessarily the card's fault and we actually tested gpu sag a few years ago for thermals and got some good shots of it then but if buying used the larger concern is one where the cooler begins to separate from the pcb components so your thermal pad might be stuck to the mosfets but the cooler could be pulling away from the thermal pad on the far side you might see this in the cell photos of the video card in which case you've saved some time you can plan to either ignore gpu sag like if it's not too extreme or fix it with a makeshift support of some kind those of you with 3d printers might be best equipped for this although there are products available to support gpus we've used just simple foam blocks in the past for physical hardware problems the obvious ones are easy if you see a broken tamper seal it's not necessarily a sign of something bad but it does mean that the user likely opened it at some point they might claim they repasted it and if they're being honest it means they probably maintained the card well and this is a good thing the one point of concern is if they're trying to sell it because they didn't know what they were doing and broke the card in the process of opening it so try to test it before buying if it's missing screws as well the same thing applies those screws don't necessarily matter but it's an indicator of a larger issue which is attention to detail and reassembly you can also look for dust buildup like in our previous video or like in the case of this sawdust encrusted video card rust is another indicator that it was in a highly humid environment or exposed to water for internals you likely won't be repasting until you at least know it works well enough to keep and we would strongly recommend if you're buying a used gpu that you don't open the card until you're fairly certain that you're keeping it because once you open it it gives the seller an avenue to accuse you of breaking it even if it was already broken we showed re-pacing in our previous video and showed one card from 11 years ago that had the silk screen paste basically fused with the aluminum heatsink so we had to chip it off and replace it it's generally just good maintenance to keep the pace somewhat fresh every few years anyway but we'll leave that to our previous video if you see excessive dust buildup or see that thermal pads are covered in filtered dirt it's a good indicator that you can easily fix what the user might not have been able to if they claim that the card's been overheating you take one look at it and see it's jammed with dust well maybe you can save some money buy something that the user is not willing to fix and fix it yourself other problems might include blown mosfets or capacitors or missing capacitors the cylindrical style capacitors are normally pretty easy to identify for failures because you'll see them bulging with time you can also see one of the legs sort of pulled out mosfets or inductors will have burn marks if they're messed up but it's unlikely you'll find these problems because it would involve opening the card however if you plug the card in and it's failing to post if red lights appear at the pcie connectors for those cards that do have leds there that would be an indicator that it may be an issue you can't really easily fix and if you can you're probably not watching this video as for capacitors missing something like an mlcc here and there isn't going to ruin the card they still work fine but it's not ideal obviously we'd also recommend keeping an eye out for warped pcbs this isn't necessarily related to gpu sag but it can be related to water block installation or from someone applying new thermal pads to the cooler that is already on there and using the wrong size thrall pads have to be exactly the right size down to half millimeters normally otherwise the pcb will bow from the cooler applying too much pressure in a particular spot so as long as the card still works this can be easily fixed by just buying the right size pads finally fans are a big one no spin fans are common these days so a fan twitching like evga is 1060 that we recently looked at or sitting idle doesn't mean it's broken it's probably a feature if it remains stationary under heavy gaming loads though there might be a problem it could be as simple as the fan header is not connected or is broken like if they ripped it out of the socket if they disassembled it or it could be that the fans have died you might also find fans with broken blades and this is something to pay close attention to when bind just if it looks like it's missing one then there's a problem fans are very easy to replace fortunately so if that's the only problem with the card it's a great project to pursue for a lower price just take the fan out identify the model on the back of it and buy a new one online most take a few minutes to replace we have a few case fans with broken blades that we can use as examples here so stress fractures can form with age on fans and with long-term use it's more common with larger fans though than with gpu fans and as those fractures form blades will normally split at the hub and you can typically see this stress fracture forming before the blade explodes off of the fan there is one more thing that can be done and that's maybe applying new lubricant to the fan's bearings depends on the type of bearing depends on if they're actually the problem but if you hear squealing from the fans when you turn the card on then normally this will fix it but replacing the fan would also work so that's going to be it for the what to look out for with buying to use gpu there's a lot of basic stuff and there's a lot of stuff we can't really teach like just being aware of how the person's listing kind of sounds when you read it and being aware of where they're located so if you're not buying locally and you're competing with the global market you're more likely to pay a higher price right now and also if you're buying on somewhere like ebay pay attention to where it's shipping from because there's certain areas based on where you are that it might be harder to get a refund or pursue a return or a replacement uh contingent on where they are relative to you so just pay attention to things like that and the social side of stuff we're not going to talk about there's just there's certain things that aren't uh aren't for this video but those are the main items from a technical perspective of what to look for and obviously there's plenty more to talk about uh crypto mining might be one a lot of people ask if a card has been used for mining is that a bad thing depends if it's a we'll call them a professional mining operation then it's possible if it wasn't in an overly hot warehouse that the card is potentially in better shape than it would be if it were in the average gamer's computer because in theory they're running it at a reduced power load it might have a modded bios on it and if that's the case you can go to attack power up and try to grab one for the same card you bought and replace the bios that's on there but it's possible it's in better shape except for if it's in an overly hot warehouse where it's been burning up for years and years and on the topic of v bios we did have that one 3080 that doesn't boot the way to identify that you plug it in you push the power button and you get a postcode on the board if the board has a seven segment display awesome look up the code oftentimes it'll come back as a vga v bios failed to initialize typically how the error is described in the manuals or you might get a post beep and you can look up what that beep code means it exists as well in in beep format but that's it for this one hopefully this helps some of you you can check out our previous video on how to clean a video card once you've bought it if you want to learn about that or keep your current card going we have a lot of revisits for older video cards as well where you can see how they perform today with benchmarks versus modern cards and other old cards or you can go to store.cameras.net if you'd like to buy something like one of our tear down tool kits especially made for video cards works with most of them on the market or one of our mouse mats or other items thank you for watching check back for more and we'll see you all next time so

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 382,075

Rating: 4.9519482 out of 5

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, used gpu, buying a used gpu, check used gpu for damage, how to know if used gpu is good, used gpu scam, used gpu scams 2021, ebay used gpu, best used gpus 2021, used gpu worth it, used gpu safe

Id: J2VkkEHDG5E

Length: 21min 12sec (1272 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/RandomCollection]

Unfortunately with the semiconductor shortage being as severe as it is, many people are vulnerable to these defective GPUs, because they are willing to buy out of desperation without looking carefully

[u/WWWVVWWW]

Zero risk of buying a GPU from places like Ebay since they absolutely love screwing over their sellers.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/riklaunim]

Nvidia has "mods" and "mats" apps used to test GPUs - mostly used to test VRAM and which chip is faulty by third party repair.

[u/Amelsander]

It's mostly common knowledge but still a good refresh. I usually try to find good deals on used gpu and i work with a fixed set of rules.

1. If it looks too good to be true, it usually is.

2. Only buy when you get the chance to see/test the gpu.

3. Be informed, when looking through adds you get people telling all sort of lies. No a 980ti is not the same as a 2060. The 1650 is not special because you cant get it anymore, ...

Also all common knowledge but the ammount of people i see tjat fall for these things is getting higher and higher.

[u/poshmosh01]

anyone have a tldw version?

[u/SiggiHD]

Too long;didn't watch?

[u/poopyheadthrowaway]

I freaked out when I saw the artifacting in the transition effects. I just undervolted my GPU because it was running hot (85C in games).

[u/CadenLucianArcher]

Voided warranty seal would be huge nope for me because most likely what happened was that it was repaired using a heat gun or just put in the oven.