I try to power up my old motherboards and most valuable vid cards every year or two if possible for at least 5-10 minutes. Have had only a few of the 70+ fail (have a few more now) over the years, most were bad caps, the others still are all original and still work perfectly. You should power them up as often as possible IMHO
ohh reminds me some have not been fired up since 2019 but I never do that in Summer, only winter when we have greater humidity....

Horun wrote on 2023-07-28, 01:50:

You should power them up as often as possible IMHO

Google published some paper >10 years ago how after every datacenter power failure event (safe loss of power, no high voltage frying anything) there is a certain % of equipment that will fail. Worked great just running, failed during power up. Overall failure rate was something like 90% weighted towards failure when starting. This is why Google early on decided its not worth powering off servers temporarily during low load quiet periods - cost of hardware and labor to replace it was too high.

Power up puts stress on electronics. You shouldnt power it up if you dont need it, or keep it powered up 24/7 😀. Powered up equipment failures follow bathtub curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve. The biggest thing that ages even when not in use are electrolytic caps, and those can always be replaced.