kixs wrote:I've no idea what is the expected lifetime of any component. My oldest VGA card is from 1989 I believe and still runs fine. But things can and will go bad from time to time. For example I bought used boxed Radeon HD6870 about 4 years ago. Tested it for few days and then put it back in a box. A few months ago I wanted to play around with it and installed it in the same computer as 4 years ago. Artifacts all over the display 🙁 Card was in an anti-static bag in original box. I guess bad investment 🤣
Still I'd suspect handling in a situation like this. RAM chips don't spontaneously die (unless exposed to ionizing radiation, in which case it wouldn't just be the hardware that was dying). The trouble with ESD is that damage doesn't instantly surface - sometimes it can weaken connections and have them fail days, weeks, months or even years down the line. That means it could be the previous owner who killed the card, but nothing being visible at time of sale.
Newer cards are made to finer tolerances than older ones, and - generally speaking - they run hotter, which is also known to shorten lifespan of cards, particularly if the cooling solution decides to crap out - like Errius describes. His story is what I'd expect of generic age-related failure - which theoretically could have been avoided by monitoring the fan better. The cases of 'working' cards being put away then failing on/soon after re-use just scream ESD.
Nice example here by the way: our main systems aren't officially retro, but first/second generation i3/i7 are almost 9 years old now - and still perfectly serviceable for daily use. My partner wanted to upgrade her SSD from 80GB to 250GB and add 8GB more RAM. Sounds simple - stick the DIMMs in the free slots, get the new drive, hook it up to PSU and a free SATA port and then do rest in software. Somehow though she managed to fry the motherboard&CPU (memory controller) while she was at it. Nothing was connected incorrectly and the system was disconnected from the mains while being worked upon, and there was no visible damage to any parts - indeed, apart from CPU all parts worked in my other So1156 system. So that leaves ESD: she probably discharged straight into the memory slot while installing the new DIMM...