Is Salad safe for my PC?

Yes. Salad is safe to run on any well-maintained consumer PC. GPUs and CPUs are built for sustained heavy workloads; the same chips run in data centers around the clock for years. With adequate cooling and regular cleaning, Salad keeps your hardware well within its design limits.

Will Salad wear out my GPU?

Running Salad stresses your PC about as much as a demanding game, a local AI model or a long 3D render. The GPU chip itself tolerates sustained load extremely well: crypto mining ran millions of cards 24/7 for years under harsher conditions, and independent tests of ex-mining cards found them indistinguishable from lightly used ones. A steady workload also holds the card at a stable temperature, which is gentler on the circuit board than the heat-up and cool-down cycles of start-stop gaming.

What the extra hours do use up are the parts designed to be maintained: fans, thermal paste and dust filters. Fans are rated for years of continuous use and cost little to replace; thermal paste costs a few dollars. In practice most GPUs are retired for being outdated long before they wear out.

Keep an eye on temperatures

• Keep the GPU core under 90 °C.
• On cards with GDDR6X memory (RTX 3080 and 3090 class), also watch the memory junction temperature and keep it under about 95 °C. Hot memory is the most common failure point on heavily used cards.
• Free tools like HWiNFO show both. If temperatures creep up over months, the cause is usually dust or dried thermal paste, both cheap fixes.

Overclocking, underclocking and undervolting

Run your GPU and CPU at factory settings.

• Power limiting or underclocking makes your machine fail the performance check, triggers a "GPU Power Limit Set" notification and blocks container jobs. See How power limiting impacts your earnings.

Maintain your PC

• Dust it every 3 to 6 months with compressed air on fans, filters and heatsinks.
• Keep it off carpet, away from pets, with vents unblocked.
• If it runs hotter than it used to despite cleaning, the thermal paste and pads may need replacing, a routine job for any repair shop.
• A loud or stopped GPU fan is cheap to replace; if the card is under warranty, go through the manufacturer.

If Salad is safe, why does antivirus flag it?

Some antivirus programs flag Salad because it uses advanced Windows features such as WSL and, if you have mining enabled, open-source miner software that malware also abuses. It is a false positive: Salad doesn't harm your PC or compromise your privacy. See Antivirus for how to allow it, and How to check if your Salad installer is safe.

Still have concerns? Contact Salad Support.