That's interesting, HWinfo and task manager both list it as quad channel and that's what the reviews I saw mentioned too.
Feel free to correct me on this.
Probably not it but was it configured in the BIOS to wait before booting into an OS? I had good luck with resetting the BIOS.
I'd first check to see if the laptop somehow got it's ssd replaced with a hdd when it fell off the truck, then check for firmware updates.
I got a rx-5700 that used to be for mining. I think they may be fine, miners are cheap and did the math and realized downclocking their GPUs so they last longer makes them have more resale value. that's why those miner-specific GPUs that had no video out ports failed so badly.
I haven’t bought a miner GPU, but I have used my own mining GPUs for games etc, and they’ve been fine. Mining is very light on the GPU but intensive on the memory, and the way most of us ran them was downclocked as far as it would go with the memory slightly overclocked but not overvolted and the fans at full blast constantly. Miner GPUs are fine, constant high loads actually don’t cause very much wear, it’s constantly switching between high load and no load that will do damage (by way of constant thermal expansion and contraction). You have to go well over a hundred degrees to damage silicon just from heat, and miners don’t do that because it would quickly render vapour chambers ineffective.
I thought they downclocked them because it made no difference in hashing and it used way less power? use too much and there goes your profit margin. Some dudes were moving operations to the middle of nowhere near a powerplant to get cheaper watts.
Most of these miners cards are coming from guys who had entire warehouses of them, specially the ones for sale at AE, so who knows.
Coil whine generally doesn’t amplify with use, it actually dampens. But I wouldn’t worry about it, mining GPUs are fine.
They also make them for AM5 fwiw. Useless for any temp dropping reasons, but I guess they help keep paste out of the little notches and look kind of cool I guess.
A 3080? damn! you're auntie of the year.
I've put a lot of mined Polaris cards into builds. They're usually fine, at least short-term. Probably around the same rate as new ones, as AMD cards in general have more issues.
speaking of DDR5, any point in going with that yet?
Mine might be? I don't really plan to do much gaming in the future that requires higher specs, and all indications are that equivalent hardware will be available in more compact systems like prebuilts or even Steam Deck equivalents.
Apple Silicon is damn good, so I might actually be reaching the point of switching to a MacBook Pro Ultra workstation with my current workstation becoming a server for crunching the biggest numbers in the future. Games actually are the biggest issue there. I can easily run new releases I’m kind of interested in like BG3 or Starfield on my x86 linux workstation, but Mac support seems rather far off. Most of my older favourites work fine though so I guess one solution is to just game on the server if it comes to that.
I'm at the endgame with mine. I can't go further and won't even try upgrading until at least amd 9000 series.
