 I think it's pretty safe to say that anyone who's purchased an electronic doodad of some sort has experienced performance degradation over time. How's that iPhone 4 running for you these days? But what exactly causes your devices to go from hero to zero over a span of just a few years? Cooler Masters MasterCase Maker 5 features their freeform modular system allowing you to customize, adjust, and upgrade. Make it yours at the link in the video description. So today's investigation was actually inspired by a conversation thread that I saw over on Reddit about the Radeon RX 480 graphics card announcement video we did with Raja Kaduri from AMD. Where one of the commenters suggested that AMD's practice of loaning graphics cards to reviewers, then asking them to send them along to another reviewer, could hurt their benchmark scores due to the cards becoming worn out. The back and forth discussion that followed is something that I've seen a fair number of times in the context of whether or not it's safe to buy used computer parts, especially cards that have been used for cryptocurrency mining. But it's one that I've never seen actually tested. Now, the problem is that new hardware is impossible to go forward in time and make old, so no investigation into like a GTX 1080's performance degradation over time can really be done. And that old hardware is very, very difficult to find in still brand new condition, that is to say, unless you've got friends in low places like EVGA's warehouse, for example, where just such a thing was found by my bud, Jacob, over there. This is a brand spanking new, still sealed, reference GTX 480, a six-year-old graphics card. And this is a reference GTX 480 that was extensively used for benchmarking, moved to my personal rig, then used for benchmarking some more, with plenty of rough Linus Tech Tips handling in between. So if there's any card that could have degraded due to hard use, mistreatment, or heat, this GTX 480 is it. So let's unbox the new one and see if this one's performance has degraded. Wow, this is not my most graceful unboxing ever. It's all right. It's not really the point of the video. And it's so crazy to see such an old product, new packaging. Yeah, there you have it. Brand new. No. Hmm? No, I just hate taking that off. Brand new, shiny. And you could tell if they had packaged up a used one and sent it to me, because the thing about 480s is this surface stains when you touch it. So you can tell this is legitimately brand new and has been sitting in that box for somewhere between four and a half to six years, because it is pristine. So there it is. That's our card. So I'm back from all my testing and let's run through the results here. For my test bench to avoid any hardware bottlenecks, so that's still running warm, I'll be using a very different class of hardware than what was available in the GTX 480 era. A Core i7-5960X, 8 core extreme edition, 128 gigs of DDR4 RAM, and all of that running on an ASUS X99 Deluxe II motherboard. And I'll be beginning this then with a look at temperatures and raw clock speeds compared to what is advertised. If the card is actually throttling down while under heavy load, then a discrepancy here could save me a lot of trouble running any other tests. For this I used our Crysis 3 Skybox thermal test, which is both real world and one that puts the card under 100% load, spiking it up to almost 90 degrees on the GPU core. Even on an open air test bench with a fan blowing down on it. A reminder to the fanboys out there that life is regrettably not as simple as AMD cards run hot or Nvidia has better drivers. It varies significantly from product to product. Anyway, speaking of varying significantly, they didn't. Both cards behaved identically here after 10 minutes with our brand new card requiring 1% more fan speed for the same 701 MHz core clock and 90 degree operating temperature. Let's move on to other tests then. 3DMark usually has some variation from run to run, but both of my 480s got sh** on just about equally. With FutureMark comparing our rig here to a gaming laptop from 2013 in spite of the beefy CPU. But let's run some real games then. Crysis 3 at high details and textures shows us that the GTX 480 is still a reasonably competent gaming card, whether it's brand new or very old. And I guess this test is also a testament to the repeatability of our Crysis 3 benchmark run because they came in pretty damn near the same. The canned benchmarks in Batman Arkham Origins and Grand Theft Auto V tell a similar story, leading us finally, anticlimactically, to the conclusion. Other than their cooling fans, which will whine or stop outright when they fail, video cards, like most computer hardware, have no moving parts. And therefore do not generally suffer from gradually declining performance from use over an extended period of time in the same way that, let's say, a stick of chewing gum would. Which does not mean that they don't wear out. Electron migration, the momentum of electrons eventually causing atoms to move, can cause circuits to fail. And this is made worse by heat or by overclocking. It's just that the way that they fail is not generally gradual or predictable. It's more like the way that the roof of your house would fail. It totally works until such time as it doesn't totally work and you get water on your head and it's time for a new one. So if your iPhone or your laptop, like a video card, doesn't have any moving parts, then based on our testing today, the reason for its slowdown, that is to say, if its storage device is still running well, is more likely to do with software. With bloated applications like anti-malware packages or malware itself, pick your poison, right? Running in the background and operating system updates that are designed with more overhead for newer, faster hardware being the most common culprits. So as you can imagine for a technology YouTube channel, we use technology here in our office to improve efficiency a lot. From the inventory system that we added when we moved into the new office, so we don't have to just be like, uh, hey, does anyone have the 4790K? To the much improved tracking system for all of our videos, ads, vessel releases, YouTube releases, etc. that has replaced the old whiteboard and handwritten notes. So just as we're improving efficiency in our office using technology, HP is using new printer technology to help improve your office experience. So they're featuring the PageWide Pro MFP477DW, which has best in class printing speeds, prints four times more pages than standard cartridges with their PageWide extra high yield cartridges, and allows you to save on printer ink, on electricity cost, and on time. Because the best possible printer, in my mind, is the one that sits in a corner and is completely invisible, except when you need it to work, and just freaking works. Because you don't have time to tinker around with something like this when you need, oh I don't know, talent release forms for a shoot that you're running out the door to do, or whatever the case may be. So if you want to learn more, check it out at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching guys, if this video sucked you know where that button is, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button, or even consider supporting us directly by buying a cool shirt like this one, or with a direct monthly contribution through our forum. Also please note that we'll have an Amazon link in the video description where you can check out any of the products that we featured today. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next, click that little button in the top right corner to check out our latest video over on Channel Superfun.