The mining generation, priced honestly
Ethereum ran on GPUs until September 2022, and Ampere was the generation doing the work. Plenty of used 3060s, 3070s and 3080s in the UAE spent time on a rig, which is why sellers hide it and buyers assume the worst.
We do neither. A card that mined at a sensible power limit with steady airflow can be in better shape than one that thermal-cycled through nightly gaming in a hot, closed case. What matters is the hours, the fan condition and how the memory behaves now, all of which we measure on the bench.
Say it in the first message. A declared history means the number we send is the number you collect, instead of something that shifts halfway through the inspection.
GDDR6X heat and thermal pads on the 3090
The 3090 and 3090 Ti carry 24GB of GDDR6X, and on the 3090 half of those modules sit on the back of the board under the backplate. They run hot enough that pad replacement became routine maintenance, and a 3090 still on original pads usually reads very high memory junction temperatures.
An opened 3090 is therefore not a warning sign. A card with fresh, correctly sized pads is worth more to us than an untouched one. Pads of the wrong thickness are the real problem, because they lift the cooler off the die.
The 3080 Ti and 3080 share that memory type and that appetite for heat. The 3070 and below run plain GDDR6 and are far less fussy.
Fans, dust and years in a Dubai room
Ampere cards are old enough that mechanical wear is the main condition question now. We spin the fans up and down and listen: a bearing that ticks at low RPM or rattles once warm needs replacing, and we price that in.
Dust matters too. Cards stored in an unairconditioned room or a garage through a Dubai summer can show corrosion on the board and paste dried out completely. Neither is fatal on its own. Both are visible.
Original 8-pin cables and the Founders Edition 12-pin adapter add to the figure if you kept them.
Variants, LHR cards and what the memory test proves
Ampere is the generation where the exact variant matters most. The 3080 shipped in 10GB and 12GB versions, the 3060 in 12GB and a later 8GB one, and the 3070 Ti sits close enough to the 3070 that listings mix them up. Send the wording from the sticker: those are separate rows.
Some 2021 cards are LHR units, carrying the hash-rate limiter NVIDIA fitted mid-generation. That stopped mattering to value the moment Ethereum left GPUs behind, and we do not price LHR and non-LHR cards differently. It comes up often enough to be worth stating.
Heat-cycled GDDR6X is the failure mode this generation shows most, surfacing as artefacting or memory errors under a dedicated stress test long before the core misbehaves. A graphics benchmark alone is not proof an Ampere card is healthy.