Dual mining in 5 min with your gaming PC (beginner tutorial)

Do you have a gaming PC with a good graphics card, even one from a previous generation? It can mine while you are not playing. In this beginner video (in French), we show you how to dual mine, that is, mine with the graphics card and the processor at the same time, in two ways: by setting up two mining programs yourself, or by letting NiceHash handle everything.

Video published in 2021: the figures below date from that time. See "What about today?" at the end of the article.

How dual mining works

Not all cryptocurrencies are mined with the same hardware. Bitcoin is mined with ASICs, dedicated machines. Other coins are mined with a graphics card, and others again with a processor. On a PC, you can therefore put both to work: the graphics card on a GPU coin, the processor on a CPU coin.

Mining Ethereum with the graphics card

For the graphics card, we use NBMiner, which handles AMD and NVIDIA cards well, including LHR cards, common among recent models. Once you have downloaded the Windows version, the folder contains small ready-made launch files, including one for Ethereum. You simply edit it to enter:

• the pool server address, followed by a colon and the port: on our pool, the default port is 4444 for an unsecured connection and 5555 for a secured one;
• your Ethereum wallet address;
• a worker name, to recognise your machine.

As for pools, Ethermine is the historic one; we use Flexpool, and would also mention 2Miners, Nanopool and Binance's pool. On the pool's website, the getting-started page for Ethereum and GPU miners gives the server address to copy.

You then run the file: NBMiner connects to the pool and mining starts. On our RTX 3070, it gets close to 60 MH/s for about 130 W.

Tuning the card with MSI Afterburner

These figures come from an overclock set in MSI Afterburner, using three parameters: the power limit (power draw), the core clock and the memory clock. On our RTX 3070, we set the core clock to -330 and the memory clock to +1300, which is not necessarily the most optimised setting. To find settings suited to your card model, we recommend the hashrate.no website, which offers several overclocking profiles per card.

Once the first shares are accepted, go back to the pool's website and search for your wallet address to follow your hashrate and earnings.

Mining Raptoreum with the processor

For the processor, the coin we chose is Raptoreum, which was gaining momentum. AMD Ryzen 5, 7 and 9 processors do well; Intel processors can mine it too, slightly less well.

• The pool: the largest is Flockpool, which we recommend; the others are much smaller.
• The software: cpuminer, downloaded in its Windows version from the link provided. In its folder, a configuration file has to be edited with the pool address and your username (wallet address and worker name).
• The first launch: the program asks for administrator rights, then spends a good one to two hours calibrating itself (tuning).
• The wallet: we use Zelcore, which we also use for the Flux coin; we had €46 worth of Raptoreum in it.

The simple method: NiceHash

If all this seems complicated, NiceHash does everything for you: the software mines the most profitable coin for your graphics card and processor, and pays you, overall, in Bitcoin. You just create an account and download NiceHash Miner.

The software detects the graphics card and the processor (a Ryzen 7 in our case), and you can enable just one or the other. On first launch it runs a benchmark: it tests your hardware to find out which coins it mines best, which takes a little time. It relies on several mining programs, such as Excavator, lolMiner or XMRig for the processor. In our test, the processor mines Monero, and NiceHash shows a profitability of about $3.50 per day for the graphics card and processor together.

Paying off your gaming PC

In our view, mining could at the time pay back all your hardware in one year, a year and a half or two years, depending on how much time you spend gaming. One rule to follow: do not run the miner while you are playing, or the game will lag.

What about today?

Since Ethereum moved to proof of stake on 15 September 2022 (the Merge), Ethereum can no longer be mined with graphics cards, and GPU mining income has collapsed: the earnings and payback times above are out of date. To mine today, dedicated machines, ASICs, are the ones that make sense.

To mine at home, have a look at our quiet, compact miners or our full range of ASIC miners, and estimate your earnings with our Bitcoin mining profitability calculator. Our other guides are on the tutorials page.