Inno3D, which is a major graphics card manufacture, has started putting labels on their desktop graphics cards that the company reserves the right to void the warranty if there is any damage associated to mining. Shown above is the image that comes on top of box where it states that the Inno3D graphics card is not designed for crypto mining.
However, many of our readers have expressed concern over this. How will Inno3D make out if a user was mining or not? Many users who are hardcore gamers or do video editing all day can make use of the fan which is the first to die when a graphics card is heavily used.
Some have said that the sticker will have zero value in Europe where the manufactures are forced to cover their products under warranty for full two years. Even in USA, if the Inno3D revokes your warranty over the sticker and you take them to court over it or small claims, you will win, precedent has been set time and time again and you, as a consumer, have rights endowed to you for the first 90 days I believe for electronics if anything hardware related goes wrong with it.
A lot of users use Nvidia and AMD graphics cards for mining Ethereum, Zcash and other crypto currencies that accept Equihash and other algorithms. Miners run these graphics cards 24×7 and even have special operating systems like EthOS that are fine tuned to extract maximum performance out of these graphics cards. This results in premature death of many graphics cards.
There needs to be a chip inside which counts the hours the card has been tortured with mining, so that manufacturers can read it out and refuse warranty. Also customers can look up on that counter if they got them second hand. Hardware degradation is a thing and it’s not just affecting the fans.