GPU CERT
Independent Verification Protocol

Hardware verification for the used GPU market

Prove the card works before you ask a stranger to trust you.

A used GPU listing is a claim with nothing behind it. GPU Cert runs a fixed test protocol against the card in your machine, then issues a signed certificate at a public URL. The buyer checks it themselves. No account needed to run it.

Test your GPU Windows, 3.8 MB. Runs about 16 minutes.

What gets tested

Stress test

Five minutes of sustained compute load through a hand-written Vulkan kernel, logging temperature and clocks throughout.

Catches cards that overheat, never thermally settle, or throttle hard under load.

VRAM pattern test

A bit-pattern write and verify sweep across the card's active memory, ten minutes, derived from memtest_vulkan.

Catches the memory damage heavy mining leaves behind. Telemetry alone cannot see it. One error fails the card.

Render integrity test

Renders a deterministic shader and checks every pixel of every frame against the expected output, exactly, with no tolerance.

Catches rasterizer and shader-core defects that produce wrong pixels rather than no pixels, which neither test above reads back far enough to notice.

PCIe link width is checked too: a card sitting in a degraded slot, riser or connector fails with that stated as the reason. Any test aborts on its own if the GPU crosses 100 °C, and an aborted run is reported as a finding rather than thrown away.

How it works

  1. Download and run gpu-cert.exe
    A console app. It reads the card's identity, runs the three tests, and submits the result.
  2. Your browser opens the finished certificate
    Signed server-side and bound to that specific card's fingerprint, at a public URL.
  3. Put the link in your listing
    Anyone can open it and check the result without installing anything or taking your word for it.
  4. Optional: put your name on it
    The certificate is public and verifiable without an account. To attach one to your name, so it appears in your register and you can build a track record, you need an account with a confirmed email. Connect it to the app once and every later run files itself; certificates already made can be attached afterwards.

Why a buyer should believe it

The certificate is signed with GPU Cert's key when it is issued, not generated in the browser showing it to you. Anyone can re-check that signature on the verification page, or against GPU Cert's published signing key without trusting this site at all.

There are plenty of good diagnostic tools already. None of them produce something a stranger can check.