Is my computer any good for mining monero?

In this post I'm going to show you how you can calculate how much monero you'll get for mining on your current computer.

Monero is only really worth mining on a CPU, so forget about your GPU for now. It would get probably 10% or less of what the CPU does, while using a lot more power. See here for a full explanation.

We'll just calculate for the CPU.

Also, forget about the hashrate you get with mining on other coins. Monero uses a different algorithm so the hashrate on other coins is completely irrelevant.

First go to this website and search for your CPU. If you can't find it on that website, try to find another CPU from the same generation with the same number of cores. Once you've found your CPU, copy the hashrate.

Keep in mind that often the hashrate shown will be with the CPU highly overclocked and with fast & very expensive RAM. With a normal setup you'll get about 70% of that figure. Obviously this varies, and if you're using a laptop then it will probably be much closer because laptops are harder to overclock.

Now go to this monero profitability calculator and put in the hashrate you just found. Set the power consumption to 0 since we don't know what the correct value is at the moment for your system.

If the hashrate you copied was in H/s then make sure the calculator is also set to H/s, not kH/s. You can set that just to the right of where you paste in the value.

Let me say that again for the people who don't read things carefully. MAKE SURE THE CALCULATOR IS SET TO THE SAME UNIT AS WHERE YOU COPIED THE HASHRATE FROM. That means if you copied a number in Hash/Second then set the calculator to H/s, NOT KH/s.

You should see something like this: 


The profit per day tells you the amount of monero (converted to USD) you'll be earning per day, not taking into account your electricity costs. Your electricity could actually be costing you more than you're earning so it's a good idea to find out how much your computer uses.

If you want to take into account electricity costs, I recommend using a power meter to measure the power of the whole computer from the wall while running XMRig or your chosen mining software. I have a simple guide on setting up XMRig.

Note: People often make the mistake of using the TDP of the CPU to calculate power usage. This is not correct. The TDP does not represent how much power the CPU uses, and it doesn't take into account the power used by all the other components in the system. See here for a post with an example of calculating whole system power usage.


Comments

  1. etw0115/06/2021, 19:25

    Thanks for this.

    I chose to mine XMR to support the network. Recently I built a Ryzen 3900 system for $1000. I'm getting .004 XMR a day right now. Still tinkering with settings to see if I can improve my hash rate.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Muhammad08/11/2021, 07:32

      You're getting 0.004 Monero = 1.073493 US Dollar (USD) a day?

      Can we chat privately please, I need to ask you few questions about your setup.

      Thanks!

      Delete

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