Do data center CPUs have shorter lifespans?

And anecdotally, it’s not unprecedented. I’ve heard stories of gamers who bought second-hand, high-end GPU cards that had been used for crypto mining. Those cards ran 24/7 for months if not years and later died on the gamers who bought them, not realizing they’d purchased heavily used cards.

Still, the process of powering on and powering off a PC is actually worse than leaving it running steadily, notes Jon Peddie, who is president of Jon Peddie Research, which specializes in all things graphics (full disclosure: I do some work for JPR), and has a degree in electrical engineering.

“The thing that will damage a chip is turning it on and off; that causes temp cycle which impacts the connection,” he told me. “The only reason I can think of as to why a [data center add-in board] should fail is the contributed heat from the adjoining AIBs. I heat my little lab with one RTX 4090 – not a joke.”