Crypto Mining on Home PC For Beginners

by robinhood1596

So some people asked me to share how i mine with my Private Desktop PC, so i thought to make a quick guide. Also i didn’t found another guide on here so OC i guess? This guide will be for ETH but its’s basically all the same steps for other coins. Don’t use it on Laptops.

Disclaimer: I’m a beginner! Probably nothing in here is the absolute best or safest Method to mine. Also if you fry your PC, blame yourself. I will show how I’m doing it and for every part there’s like a dozen other Options to do the very same thing. Research for yourself.

The Basics

PC uses electricity to help the Coin you are mining to work properly. PCs do that at different speed, depending on your rig. Speed is measured in MH/s (or equivalents). Higher is better. PC can overheat if not done properly so monitor that from time to time. That’s it. That’s the Basics.

Calculating your profitability

Electricity does cost money in most cases. To calculate how much you’ll pay for electricity in relation to how much you can gain use https://whattomine.com/ . Just click on the card you have (the most mainstream ones are in there) enter your electricity cost and voilá. Do you make a profit? Good. Do you make a big enough profit for it to be worth your time? Even better. If you don’t make a profit you might want to rethink mining.

For more advanced users there are alternatives like this or this.

Edit: If you don’t want to use your PC while mining and simply let it online for mining, don’t forget to include the other components powerusage into you calculation. There are different tools online, but you get the most exact measurement by on-Wall powermeters. Keep it in mind!

The Wallet.

You need to have a virtual wallet to store your ETH to. The ones i found are Atomic and Exodus. Again, there’s a dozen other options like hardware wallets or other provider, but those seem good. Set it up. and PLEASE: Save your Backup phrase and passwords. Externally on a piece of paper or so. Keep it like your life depends on it. Otherwise you might lose your ETH forever.

The mining Pool

Mining solo is bad. You can (and will) go days without profit. To fix that use a pool. It’s basically a joining of computer power to make income more reliable. Search a good one with low fees (if any) and a serious one. I use https://ethermine.org/ . There are others, with different payout methods and so on. DYO. This one seems good enough, especially with the low payout limit of 0.01 ETH.

The mining software

Don’t try something fancy with miningOS or anything else if you just start like me. It’s still your Desktop PC so i guess you have Windows, because if you have linux you probably don’t need this Basic guide. I use Minerstat. It’s easy to setup, has overclocking Options, has a variety of miners and coins, it’s free if you only have one PC you want to use it on and it has monitoring. And even an App with remote control. I haven’t found anything negative on them so I guess its fine.

The actual mining software

I lied. You still have to chose a miner. Minerstat is only kinda the middleman for the mining software. Again: There’s a variety of Programs you can use. I use the opensource Ethermine. It has no DEV-Fee and seems fairly fast. You MH/s can vary between mining software but as i see it it’s not as much? And the extra Dev-Fee on those programs are probably not worth the 1% extra power since it will go to Dev-Fee anyway. Use Ethermine.

Setup

To choose the software start minerstat, click on Dashboard (the little screen with the lines) go to worker config and then look at this screenshot.

This is what your page should look like.

For coin: just select ETH.

For Pool: Go to your pools page. Usually there is a start to mine page. Use the closest server (if you are in US use US east or west and Europe use EU), copy the address, copy the port and paste it into the field with pool above it.

For your wallet address: Go to you wallet, log in search your ETH wallet, copy the address and paste it where that blank space is.

Save it.

That’s it. You are basically done.

Go to the minerstat program, click “start mining” and hope that your PC doesn’t burn up (it normally won’t). It will first download the software and start mining. After that you can see your MH/s your Temp, your Powerusage etc. if you go to the Web-Page and click workers. I was able to use my PC while mining, of course with a lot less MH/s. But if you are using the PC anyway the extra power usage won’t cost you that much. If you are not using the PC just let it run. Afterwards look at the Watt usage and Hashrate. Use a calculator mentioned above and look if it is still profitable. Yes? Perfect!

Look closely at the GPU Temperature. Is it somewhere above 70°C while you are not using it? I’m not an expert, but that was as high as i was willing to go. If its higher you might want to reconsider mining. If it’s above 80°C i really urge you to not mine. The tradeoff is probably not worth it since your GPU will die MUCH faster and you’ll have to buy a new one.

if your PC is crashing, probably don’t mine.

Also look at the Ethermine page and enter your wallet address there. Now you can see your Hashrate, your estimated daily profits, your unpaid balance etc. If everything worked you should see that something is mining and your balance is going up. If not troubleshoot on you own.

Let the PC run as much as you want, use it when you want and shut it off whenever you want. You’ll make passive money. Don’t forget to start the program when you restart your PC!

Now. You CAN overclock your PC. That means you make it faster. The tradeoffs are normally more Heat and more Power usage. That might be bad. But it can be worth it. I will not go into details since every card is different. DISCLAIMER: You can fuck up seriously. Be really careful, especially with heat and crashes. I don’t take responsibility for anything. Also you might lose warranty on your GPU if you overclock.

1. Research good values for your card. Normally Higher Memoryspeed and lower Corespeed are good. Also you can set lower Powerusage. That means less heat and less Costs for you.
2. Go to the Minerstatpage, go to clocktune, select your card and OS, enter the values. You might want to set speedfan to static. Don’t go much higher than 60%, cards are not meant to turn permanently higher than that. Save the Settings.
3. Select the Clockprofile on your workers config.
4. Monitor the heat. Is it too high? Start from Step 2 and lower the values. Go down in 100 or 50MHz steps.
5. Does your PC crash at any point? Start from Step 2 and lower the values. Go down in 100 or 50MHz steps.
6. Again: look at the Hashrates and Powerusage? Is it still worth it?
7. You are still here? Perfect. Make money.

And we are done. Congratulations, you are mining ETH. Look out for the summer, it gets hot.