# 1st time looking to have a crack at mining - a little guidance needed



## wheresmycar (Apr 6, 2021)

I'm running a 1080 TI and usually game 5-10 hours a week.  The rest of the time the GPU's pretty much idle but supporting 2 displays (1440p+1080p) and the build is regularly put to use as a daily driver (work/other). 

A few questions for the confidence boost:

1. For my use-case, is mining safe? Pardon my ignorance, by questioning safety I mean if i'm working, banking, using payment cards online whilst mining (via GPU) am I protected?

2. Am I good to run 2 displays off the card whilst mining?

3. I understand VRAM plays a significant role here... so undervolting and raising the memory bar (if achievable) is the way forward. Any other recommendations? 

4. I understand NiceHash would make the perfect introduction for a newbie. The profit calculator suggests £2.50 a day (better than nothing). Are there other similar services offering a better return?

5. Anything else I should be considering? 

Thanks a bunch, in adv!


----------



## jboydgolfer (Apr 6, 2021)

id not bother with that build.

not to say you shouldnt do it for fun, or just to try it, but in terms of profitability, id say it wouldnt be sustainable
you can use a mining calculator to see what kind of profit you might see ballpark, & then weigh that against your electricity costs, & see where you'd stand


----------



## Athlonite (Apr 6, 2021)

Agree with @jboydgolfer if you don't have access to dirt cheap power it's pretty much a waste of time using a single GPU to mine as you wont make much in profit


----------



## Chrispy_ (Apr 6, 2021)

You need to hash at least 40MH/s right now to make enough profit to offset the electricity cost of a gaming CPU+mobo+fans.

So you _can_ make a small profit on a single-card system but it needs to be a beast of a mining card and modded/undervolted for efficient mining (Radeon VII, Ampere)

As for security, most of the profitable ones require you to add an exclusion to AV. I'm not sure I'd want to do that on the machine I use for work/banking. It's probably over-cautious but for the profits from just one GPU I'm not sure the risk-reward is worth it.


----------



## wheresmycar (Apr 7, 2021)

thanks for the input!

The profit after subtracting electricity is coming up around £2.50. A small sum of cash but better than nothing... 6 months of similar pay out pretty much gets me around £500 - a nice little saver for future hardware upgrades hence i'm considering this one as a worthy investment. Or am I overlooking something?

My other concern being, as long as I'm not at risk by compromising work/private data with mining applications enabled I wouldn't mind having a crack at nicehash. This ones important considering I value security above all.


----------



## Chrispy_ (Apr 7, 2021)

wheresmycar said:


> thanks for the input!
> 
> The profit after subtracting electricity is coming up around £2.50. A small sum of cash but better than nothing... 6 months of similar pay out pretty much gets me around £500 - a nice little saver for future hardware upgrades hence i'm considering this one as a worthy investment. Or am I overlooking something?
> 
> My other concern being, as long as I'm not at risk by compromising work/private data with mining applications enabled I wouldn't mind having a crack at nicehash. This ones important considering I value security above all.


I mean, it's the wrong time of year for us now, but from about October to April in the UK you're going to be using central heating. Don't think of mining costs as a complete loss - it's basically converting electricity into heat which offsets the amount of electricity/gas you use for central heating. Assuming your house has a thermostat, the mining rig is no different to a plug-in heater.

The downside is that electric heaters are about 2.5x more expensive to run than gas central heating, but it's still not a total loss.


----------

