I don't agree with that position AT ALL and bloody hate it! The idea that someone who knows anything about hardware can say with a straight face that running it full speed 24/7 won't age the hardware prematurely is just beyond ridiculous to me, at best it's a real reach.
There are plenty of studies regarding the ageing of electrolytic capacitors (usually the first ones to go). IIRC, most of them have a lifespan of >80 000 hours at nominal (or lower) values for voltage, current and temperature. That's 9 years of continuous operation.
Theoretically, the "full speed 24/7" usage on GPUs won't be causing any real problems if the GPU is being used in a home setup with a proper case, decent power supply and normal room temperature.
Well before we reach those 9 years (well before we reach half of that, probably), the arrival of new hardware that will greatly increase mining performance will also increase mining difficulty and make the current GPUs non-profitable for mining.
What is bound to fail are the moving parts of the graphics card (fans and water pumps in the case of liquid cooled models) because those have a life expectancy of about 10 - 20 000 hours, so about 1-2 years of continuous operation.
Again, this is in the case of a
home setup.
In fact, if I had to guess, many overclocked+overvolted cards that are used 1h/day may have their lifetime quite a bit more shortened than cards in standard setups being used for mining 24/7. Even more if we consider that most hobbyist miners end up being underclocking+undervolting their cards to spend less energy and make more money.
Now industrial mining farms is a whole other issue. In there, we don't know in what conditions the cards are kept, and I'd bet they're not very concerned in keeping hundreds of cards working together in a room temperature below 30ºC. They might have those working on rooms at 50-60 ºC or more, and that might put the electrolytic capacitors working at well above the ~100ºC most of them are rated to work at.
That said, IMHO it's reasonably safe to recommend mining for home users who have capable hardware at their house as 24/7 mining won't cause substantial harm to their systems. The cards will probably become unprofitable for mining well before they surpass their practical lifetime as gaming cards, and the fans that might fail earlier are usually easy and cheap to replace.
Moreover, it's not like hobbyist miners who have 1 or 2 graphics cards laying around in their house are screwing up the GPU market, as those probably even bought the cards before the mining craze swept the world stock in late 2017.. so no real harm is being done here.
Now what I would
not recommend is to purchase 2nd-hand cards from mining farms, for the reasons listed above. When farm miners start selling their current cards, I would definitely stay away from those. And they should be rather easy to spot, as they'll probably appear on ebay with stocks in the hundreds/thousands.
