Energy washing your GPU looks like a horrible thought

Now that the Merge has occurred, large-scale ethereum miners are discovering themselves with a lot of GPUs with nothing to mine. This implies a few of these operations will doubtless try to dump their mining kits on the secondhand market to salvage some revenue. However first, you bought to wash your stock, right?

A sequence of movies posted by Twitter consumer I_Leak_VN (noticed by Tom’s {Hardware}) exhibits Vietnamese miners utilizing a powerwasher on the graphics playing cards inside their mining rigs. One video even exhibits a handful of GPUs bathed in ozone water, in accordance with the tweet. 

The video could appear clearly ridiculous, besides: I strongly advocate in opposition to energy washing your gaming PC or parts with water out of your yard hose. I do get the temptation; we all know from Powerwash Simulator that energy washing guidelines. Simply… not on this case.  

The stress from the jet wash may simply injury a graphics card, blast off a capacitor, or wash away thermal paste or lube, as Tom’s {Hardware} factors out. That does not even cowl {the electrical} injury that would probably be accomplished through the use of common ole water.

You can probably use ozone or deionized water to wash electronics because it does not include the impurities that make faucet water conduct electrical energy. As long as you let the parts dry out after a deionized water tub, they need to work once more simply fantastic. Nevertheless, even for those who dunk your stuff in deionized water, it may possibly nonetheless get contaminated with impurities when you pull it out into the open air. Likewise, except you are giving your stuff a shower in a spotless clear room, that water could not keep pristine for lengthy.

I am fairly skeptical these crypto miners are drying out GPUs in a sterile surroundings, so we arrive again at my authentic level: energy washing your pc is a foul thought. The very last thing you need to plug right into a PC is a GPU with a pocket of moisture trapped inside it.

These movies ought to function a warning for anybody desirous about purchasing for a used graphics card within the subsequent few months because the secondhand market is flooded with crypto mining playing cards.

Seeing that the large demand for GPUs is dropping post-Merge, they need to be just a little simpler to search out at retail. And with the launch of Nvidia’s new RTX 40-series, count on to see huge gross sales of previous-gen RTX 30-series GPUs within the subsequent few weeks. There is no cause to threat your valuable PC with a probably broken element to be able to save a buck.