Per mining: The bottom line is -ALL- mining, no matter what you're doing to the card, is an unusual, not a-typical usage situation for the hardware. It's not designed for that type of work load with consumer grade hardware. Mining significantly shortens the lifespan of a GPU the longer it's run under mining loads. End of story, no further discussion needed.
Everyone on the internet knows this. What really gets me is people on ebay that sell their cards after they've been "mined out" for 2+ years 24-7 and don't disclaim it in the listing. -THAT- is deceitful and dishonest to the N'th Degree. Some random sap will buy it for gaming thinking they're getting a good card then it'll fail on em in a few months for gaming, but may still work for mining.
Almost everyone on ebay does this. I private message a lot of sellers of GTX 1080's and ask about mining, and they own up to mining with it in messages, but won't update their listings. It should be considered fraud by ebay, but they don't care.
I've been told by a few friends on the internet shopping for a new card recently that in the USA, local "Brick and mortar" stores like Fry's Electronics and Best Buy are currently actively refusing video cards on returns unless they can prove it's defective, and Fry's is even doing bench testing in the returns center on all returned cards now, including short 3dmark passes. and if they show obvious artifacts in benchmarks but otherwise appear to work, they refuse the returns as customer damage due to the high return rate from miners. And if the cards work normally with no issues, they also refuse the returns.
This is what mining has done to the retail space for normal gaming consumers, at least over here.
On top of us gaming customers being made nervous wrecks about trying to buy new cards before they're sold out on day 1 just because miners will be buying them all up too.
Coin mining is a plague on the entire GPU industry.
