Three Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Buy or Use a Laptop for Crypto Mining

<p>One of the worst ideas you can have is to mine cryptocurrency on your laptop. Here are a few of the reasons why.</p> <p>We all have different perspectives on cryptocurrency mining. Some people adore it, while others are less enthusiastic. But there are some points on which most of us can agree. One of these is that mining cryptocurrency on a laptop is a bad idea.</p> <p>Mining cryptocurrency is best left to desktop computers or custom-built mining rigs. In this article, we'll go over why you should never buy or use a laptop for mining.</p> <p>1. It Is Not Profitable to Mine on a Laptop</p> <p>For starters, one of the primary barriers to mining on laptops is that laptop GPUs are typically weaker and more expensive than desktop GPUs. There's a reason you can get a gaming laptop while most GPUs are still out of stock — miners aren't interested in laptops, and there's a reason for that.</p> <p>Yes, we have Ampere and RDNA 2 GPUs for laptops, and they're excellent for gaming. However, in terms of raw power, a laptop Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is roughly as fast as a desktop RTX 3060 Ti in both benchmarks and proper mining performance (hash rate).</p> <p>This creates a problem because, in most cases, it will take several months to see anything resembling a return on investment. A laptop with an RTX 3080 Ti will cost between $3,000 and $3,500. According to the Ethereum network's difficulty as of this press, if it mines as well as an RTX 3070, you can expect to earn $2 per day, $60 per month, or $720 per year.</p> <p>It will take five years to even see a return on your investment. That's with good thermals, which you don't have—your laptop probably doesn't have enough cooling capacity to efficiently move heat out, and your computer will be constantly thermal-throttling to keep up. And we haven't even accounted for electricity costs—if you have a laptop on a charger drawing power from your wall 24 hours a day, your earnings will be even thinner.</p> <p>You'd be better off spending the money on a proper mining r