PC crypto mining has been huge for years now. Everyone here has probably tried running Cudominer on their home PC and found that, without a graphics card, the profits are... slow.
It's been notoriously difficult to get desktop graphics cards lately, but the availability of laptops with newer graphics cards built in has remained steady. But if you get a laptop to mine with, will you be able to make as much as you would with a desktop? This has been a difficult question to answer. I have seen a lot of articles written for outsiders on the basics (and usually dangers) of cryptomining, or I get ads for gaming laptops.
I was, finally, able to find an article that compares quantifiable metrics of the desktop vs laptop GPUs. Below are their numbers.
To break it down into direct comparisons(excluding the metrics that are the same), the laptop GPU has:
-- CUDA Cores: 87%
-- Default GPU Clock: 52%
-- Boost GPU Clock: 75%
-- Memory Clock: 86%
-- TDP: 43%
Not all of these metrics are relevant for mining, so I will focus on the cores and clock rate numbers. When estimating profit I always lean conservative in the math, so we can guess that the laptop will provide around 70% the power of the desktop GPUs.
Minerstat estimates the profit (after power consumption) of a desktop RTX 3070 at $5.25/day. So our math can be expanded to guess that the laptop will make $3.67/day.
Disregarding the benefit of buying graphics cards and making your own mining rigs, you can purchase a prebuilt gaming desktop with an RTX 3070 on NewEgg for around $1,900. $1,900/5.25 = an ROI of 362 days.
A gaming laptop on NewEgg costs around $1,700. $1,700/3.67 = and ROI of 464 days.
When it comes down to it, the desktops will create more profit and give you a better mining experience.
However, if you're in the market for a laptop, choosing one that will give you and ROI at all will be better than some notebook that doesn't have the ability to make $0.25/day mining Monero (like what I am currently using to write this article).
Thanks for reading!
Tank
