How Crypto Mining Ruins your Machine

The crypto boom is ever increasing and their is no sign of it stopping anytime in near future. With new coins coming they bring an opportunity for simple CPU users (normal home users) to mine those newer coins as they are easy to mine and the difficulty is less which means more ROI. This opportunity no matter how appealing does bring a risk with it. Risk is of ruining your machine with mining , you might have heard people saying “fried my cpu” because of mining. This article will list down the risks involved with mining so if you have only 1 machine which you use and think of putting the same for mining you might need to read along to understand the risks

How Mining actually Damages a Machine ?

Enemy of every electronic component was and still is Heat. Heat is what causes all the damage. This article will correlate the same with different circumstances. While mining on a CPU/GPU you utilize the resources at maximum power, that brings in the arch nemesis ‘Heat’. This will result in following :

• Your Machine will degrade quickly, as it is used more while heat is damaging it let say if you had to replace a machine after 10 years you will be replacing a machine you mine on after 5 years.
• Machine overheat and some components will fail because of that. As time pass by our electronics gather dust and that dust is not a very good conductor of heat and it increases the overall temperature resulting in probable component failure.
• Mining will result in an overload of some part and it will short circuit or blow a circuit / IC. If you have multiple GPUs a weak PSU (Power Supply Unit) might ruin some IC.
• Exact Maths of Mining VS Damaging my System, there is no maths to it nor your experience can be same to others. The amount of damage depends on many factors which include heat, power input, 24/7 running, dust etc. Uptill now there is no formula to calculate the damage done due to mining
• HEAT is Global Issue, You might think one odd laptop or Desktop getting warm is no issue if you keep it cold but you might be wrong. Crypotcurrency mining is a global issue even for the environment. As per Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index of only Bitcoin, it is consuming 47.26 Twh while 1 transaction of BTC can power up 18 US households. So all this electricity is definitely producing alot of heat aswell

Mining Cryptocurrency on a Laptop

Mining on a Laptop is NOT suggested, Laptops are not designed for efficient air flow (cooling). No matter which crypto you plan to mine, all these miners are tend to put full load on your CPU/GPU and the generated heats are beyond the capability of a laptop to cool down. Even if you are sitting at a place which is cold (even if its snowing outside) the motherboard/HDD/RAM/GPU are all built on top of each other and it might reduce the life of your laptop drastically.

Most PCs including Laptops have a built in feature if the temperature crosses a threshold the system will shutdown, it might seem a neat safety feature but this is not be played with alot …

Laptop Mining is a BIG NO. If you need an excuse of frying up your laptop so you may get a new one you may give it a try

Mining Cryptocurrency on a Desktop / PC

Desktops are not as compact as Laptops thus they allow more air to pass through them resulting in lower temperatures. If you plan mining on a Desktop you will need to consider and buy yourself a cooling system (airflow) it can be liquid based if you are employing 4 or more GPUs or standard 2 inlet fans and 1 outlet fan and as always keep them in a well ventilated place

While mining on Desktop with GPUs people also do the mistake of overclocking their machines while not checking the stats with the help of programs like CPU-Z & GPU-Z. If you have ever used these apps you must be knowing how important it is to keep in check the “temperature” as the higher the temperature the quickly your machine will turn to dust.

Mining Cryptocurrency on a Raspberry PI

Mining on a Raspberry PI 3 is certainly not profitable but it does technically mine , as I have shared my How To Mine on a Raspberry PI 3 Guide. As stated in the article mining on a Raspberry is not profitable but its fun nonetheless the maximum hashrate I get is 11 H/s and currently I am mining ETN on it , but all cryptonight algorithm coins will do just fine.

Will mining ruin your Raspberry PI ?  Answer is NO if you keep it well ventilated you are good to go. A Raspberry PI good ventilation is just do not let the casing touch the body and as long as there is 2mm gap no worries.

Dedicated Cryptocurrency Mining Rigs

If you want to get into dedicated mining, you can plan for a rig and make it from scratch you can get guidance from Ask Techie! or BitcoinTalk.org is a good place to ask for help. Even with simple Minergate Option you still risk the damages although the damages are almost negligible. You can even use Antminers for mining as they are dedicated units which give you better cooling and they last long as they are built for mining. Even if you make your own mining rig using GPUs they will still wear out quickly but if you keep them well ventilated they might just do fine. You can find a huge ton of information on Youtube aswell but all it depends on the amount of money you plan investing.