Old mining rig

[Ranajoy Shil]

I have an old Dual core Pentium PC, with 8gb ram, Pentium running at 3 GHz and a GEFORCE 610 and a cheap 450 watt PSU, so when I am trying to install Nice Hash it's saying "supported hardware not found" something like that!

 

So what should I upgrade to start mining on my old PC? Or what hardware should I change?

[Firewrath9]

You will be losing money for power then actually making something on that. Even semi-recent hardware like 980 tis aren't used for mining.

[mariushm]

The video card must support OpenCL or Cuda, and probably a newer version of either one that's supported by that video card.

Also, even if you could get the video card to hash, it's extremely slow... it would never be profitable to mine using that computer and video card. As an idea, with a single RX 570 video card, it would probably take you 4-5 months of continuous mining to make something like 10-15$ in Ethereum .... and it would cost you more in electricity.

[Ranajoy Shil]

10 hours ago, mariushm said:

The video card must support OpenCL or Cuda, and probably a newer version of either one that's supported by that video card.

Also, even if you could get the video card to hash, it's extremely slow... it would never be profitable to mine using that computer and video card. As an idea, with a single RX 570 video card, it would probably take you 4-5 months of continuous mining to make something like 10-15$ in Ethereum .... and it would cost you more in electricity.

I know my old 610 isn't gonna work but where I live, electricity isn't expensive, it's like less than a dollar for one unit, so what minimum GPU I should get to start mining? And should I get a 80+ PSU or not?

[mariushm]

Minimum would be RX 470 with 4 GB of memory. You need more than 3GB of memory to hash most algorithms.

I'm paying around 0.25$ per kWh ... a system with a RX 470 will consume around 100w per hour, so around 0.5$ per day.

Hashing with a RX 470 will result in maybe 10$ or so of Ethereum in a few months - but you'll spend around 30$ or more in electricity costs.

 

Any hashing with video cards is done these days starting from 50-100 video cards, otherwise you wouldn't even make enough money to eat each month.

There's specialized ASICs made for major coins, which consume something like 1000 watts but do more work than what 25-50 video cards would do.

 

Basically mining with video cards would probably be profitable only if you get some mining cards for 50-60$ from eBay and if you have the house by a river to get free hydro electricity or if you have some solar panels to get free electricity.

Then you may actually recover the money you invest in those video cards in 6 months or so.