And anecdotally, it’s not unprecedented. I’ve heard tales of avid gamers who purchased second-hand, high-end GPU playing cards that had been used for crypto mining. These playing cards ran 24/7 for months if not years and later died on the avid gamers who purchased them, not realizing they’d bought closely used playing cards.
Nonetheless, the method of powering on and powering off a PC is definitely worse than leaving it operating steadily, notes Jon Peddie, who’s president of Jon Peddie Analysis, which makes a speciality of all issues graphics (full disclosure: I do some work for JPR), and has a level in electrical engineering.
“The factor that can injury a chip is popping it on and off; that causes temp cycle which impacts the connection,” he informed me. “The one purpose I can consider as to why a [data center add-in board] ought to fail is the contributed warmth from the adjoining AIBs. I warmth my little lab with one RTX 4090 – not a joke.”