In my personal quest to find alternatives to a better crypto mining hardware, I stumble upon and interesting device, the laptop :D Yeah I know, it's not something new but this device is not just any ordinary one, it is a gaming laptop.
There are obvious differences between a Desktop and a Laptop, still after the ETH switch to PoS and migration of the mining hardware to other PoW cryptocurrencies, the power usage vs profitability became an issue, therefore a laptop that uses far less energy then a desktop seemed to be a good idea to invest in.
Unlike desktop mining, the laptop have significance disadvantages over advantages (which is basically only one = less power consumption).
These disadvantages are:
1) OVER HEATING!
The temperatures in a laptop can rise up so high that the whole device can shut down at one point. At a full throttle with dual mining (XMR & RVN for example), the temps can go up to 88 degrees Celsius.
Temperatures in Dual mining (XMR & RVN - CPU+GPU)
Temperatures in Single mining (XMR - CPU only)
An RTX 3060 that consumes much less energy than 3070 or 3080, even so it can and definitely will rise up dangerous temps in your laptop. However if you are mining only XMR, your CPU will be kept relatively cooler then in dual mining.
Now, should you dual mine with the risk of damaging your laptop overtime? In my opinion, absolutely not, but for philosophical reasons only, I consider that XMR mining can keep the network decentralized and safe, even that it is literally unprofitable and unreasonable to keep the laptop on. You could argue that even so, single mining is definitely not profitable no matter what, on this matter I would agree with you. Still, In my case i also keep my laptop running, for the hope that one day, 0.01 XMR = 100 or 500 USD ( that is, if BTC would rise to 1 Million USD around 2030 or so).
2) Uncomfortable HIGH NOISE!
The laptop (Lenovo Legion 5) even that has a good cooling system, when temps pass 50 degrees the two tiny coolers hits at full throttle and it can become annoying over time. You could lower the fans speed but you might end up in harming your laptop (CPU and GPU and probably some other internal components). If you are not bothered by the noise you could single mine the Monero.
3) The laptop MUST be kept plugged into the power wall!
Yeah it definitely must have connection to the power grid all the times. This also means that the "brick" ( it's own PSU) will always be hot and unfortunately it does not have a fan to cool it down like ordinary PSUs in any desktop.
If you will not be bothered by the noise or, you would have possibilities to keep the laptop in a very cold room, then dual mining with it could become profitable one day when the bull market will arrive.
So what do you think, you will try this mining method or forget about mining until the hashing algorithms for common coins will be changed to a more suitable and reasonable GPU mining levels.
If you would like to give it a try and mine some crypto's with your own laptop or desktop you can check out my referral link to Betterhash:
https://www.betterhash.net/?ref=29071
Take care!
