After seeing video's on Bitcoin and how easy it is to make money I thought I would see what it is all about. I downloaded Nicehash miner and set up my BTC bitcoin wallet. Luckily I have a GTX 1060 3gb in my gaming rig. I just let the software do the benchmark then I was off to the races. I would let the miner run while I was sleeping or not home. That comes out to about 10 hours a day. After a week of doing this I received two deposits into my wallet.
As you can see in the picture I have 0.002 bitcoin. As of this blog it is around $22 that is pretty good for free money. I have not done all the power consumption costs and all the other things. The way I see it I am using a machine that would either be asleep or just running idle so the energy costs isn't the important to me. What is important to me is the effect that it has had on my GPU after approximately 70 hours of mining with it.
My card running about 20 degrees C hotter than it did before I tried this experiment. Sadly I don't have a screenshot of my card premining. My card at idle with the factory fan curve is running 55C, before I started mining it would run around 36C. While playing Doom with my card now if I don't turn my fan manually up to 75% the game crashes about 30 seconds into the game. Once I turn the fan speed up i.e. getting the temperature down game play is fine.
My take on this is mining is fine and even fun. I don't know that I would recommend a serious gamer trying to pay for that expensive GPU with the money they can make with it not gaming. My card has had adverse effects from mining with it. It seems to play fine as long as I turn up the fan speed but I didn't have to do that before I mined with it. Will my experiment kill my card I don't think so, will it shorten my cards life expectancy I believe it has. This is just a small experiment I tried, I am not telling anyone what to do with their own card but this might help someone decide.
