Don’t stray your thoughts into imagining that we are talking about being all technical or setting up a mining rig of your own, and there is no recommendation being stated of purchasing hardware for you to mine. What we seek to highlight is that reports have indicated that someone who has a powerful GPU can download an easy software and use the full capability of the GPU.
Note: when using your gaming console GPU card, the results of your mining will vary based on the hardware and the price of the crypto at that moment.
How mining works
For those who are not familiar with mining, here is a brief description of how it works. The software you download simply maximizes the capacity of your GPU. This makes your GPU consume more power than it would when it was in the idle state, which will then increase your electricity bill. More heat is also generated. Therefore, you will have to have a cooling system in place. In a technical sense, mining involves solving math equations on behalf of the blockchain.
With your gaming PC, you probably are not using it all the time, so the crypto miner software can work your GPU when it is idle. Then when you want to game, you can stop the mining software.
What is NiceHash?
NiceHash is the provider of the easy software that allows you to sell your GPU’s hashing power. To start off, you will create a NiceHash account and download its mining software. With a few button clicks, you will be able to “sell” your processing power.
People who purchase processing power place their orders on the NiceHash market, and the NiceHash software you installed on your computer automatically checks for the most profitable orders. You will be part of a large pool of miners who are mining altcoins for some individuals. As a return on investment, NiceHash pays you in bitcoin.
Saleh Stevens who is a huge fan of gaming, says that NiceHash allows gamers to mine easily just by installing their graphical application and running it. But the real question Saleh Stevens would like to answer is, “Is it worth it?”
How much money can you make?
The profitability of mining is the real concept that we need to decipher. There is a profitability calculator that is offered by NiceHash. Let’s use an example to explain this part. On the profitability calculator page, depending on your selected device and electricity costs, you can be told that your earnings in a month will be at $70 after electricity costs using the NVIDIA GTX 980 TI hardware, and your electricity prices are at USD 0.10/kWh.
If you have a faster GPU, you are going to make more money because it can do more work. But you should also factor in your electricity costs; if they are high, they will eat up to your profits. The profitability calculator offered by NiceHash is very convincing. But once you have it running, you can get a real feel for the real picture.
The real earnings are dismal on a daily basis, compared to the projections that calculator stated, even before you cut the costs of electricity if you are running the NiceHash software for the whole day. If you keep your PC running all day, you might be making very little cash at the end of the day. If you compare the amount of money you will use in running the software and the ROI, the returns are quite small, making the venture not promising for good returns.
When you are using the NiceHash calculator, look at the information on the “1 Day” tab, rather than on the “1-month” tab. Ideally, you are not going to make some good cash when you mine, even if you use high-end GPU’s. The bottom line is that you should not purchase a GPU just to mine cryptos.
How to try it
You can try out using the NiceHash software and test how your PC stack. To do this, you can go ahead to NiceHash website and create an account where you will be a seller of your computing power.
After creating the account, you can download the NiceHash miner software to your PC and run it. Enter an email address that is linked to your NiceHash account and allows some benchmarks to be performed.
Once all systems are a GO, click “Start for mining to begin, and “Stop” for the mining to stop. You can also use the “Fan Control” button to make the fan of your GPU to run at its max speed. Ensure that you monitor your GPU’s temperature to avoid overheating.
Since everything is automatic with mining, NiceHash will show you your earnings in USD, but they will pay you in bitcoin. Remember that when you want to transfer your bitcoins to an external wallet, you will incur some charges which will eat into your profits.
