Gaming app ENSLAVES punter PCs in Bitcoin mining ring

Re: Why not...

your VERY expensive GPU has its operating life shorted significantly

in that case it's your very expensive AND VERY BADLY DESIGNED GPU. Silicon should last effectively forever (at least a decade, by which time it's obsolete) running at 50C - 60C. Typically it suffers logic errors and crashes at around 100C, because the hotter it gets the slower the transistors switch. This, however, is crash not burn. Once it's cooled down it again works fine.

Modern designs normally throttle themselves back when they're getting too hot, on the basis that users prefer slower to crashed. The cynic in me suggests that it's also a great way to persuade users to buy a new "faster" computer when all they really need is a new fan on the old one's heatsink to restore its original operating performance. (Or even just a vacuum cleaner to get the fluff out of the heatsink fins).

"Damage" is cumulative, caused by thermally activated migration of atoms within the chip. The rate at which it happens rises as the exp of the ABSOLUTE temperature. 60C is 333K, 100C is 373K, the difference is fairly small.

I was once called in to service an AMD Athlon system with what turned out to be a failed hard disk. Before I got there I touched the heatsink and my skin sizzled. The CPU had been running at over 100C since the fan failed months? years? ago, without any problems at all.