Mining experiment with MSI gaming laptop

The Bitcoin, aka BTC, had achieved a sky-high price of over 58,000 dollars recently. The price of BTC is around 50,000 dollars when this article is written. Even the cryptocurrency price fluctuates sharply, people are eager to have an efficient mining rig to join this party. Meanwhile, the pandemic is still raging, the GPU chip makers are in shortage to fulfill the demand of the consumer market. That makes the miners need to seek an alternative way to mine with gaming laptops, especially the latest ones with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series graphics.
We will conduct a one-month mining experiment with MSI GE76 Raider gaming laptop to see how much could be generated during this period. But before we start, here’s how to evaluate its mining performance.

A mining rig is basically a computer with extra graphics cards (or GPUs). Mining rigs are often not built with standard cases since there is not enough room to fit multiple GPUs. Standard PC chassis also tends to overheat, causing GPUs to thermal throttle. In our case, it will be a MSI gaming laptop with RTX 3080 graphics and outstanding exclusive cooling design.

Mining can be an effective way to generate passive income, but is also affected by many factors. Among them, the GPU(s) is the most important part as it’s the one generating profit. When deciding which GPU to invest in, you should pay attention to the following:

ow much electricity does it use? What is your electricity rate? Keep in mind that rates change depending on season, time of day, and many other factors. You can find this information on your electric bill measured in kWh.

How much power does your system consume? You can buy an electric meter to measure the power consumption in watts.

What is the anticipated length of time you will spend mining?

What is the value of a bitcoin in U.S. dollars or other official currency? This allows you to evaluate the ROI (return on investment) of this investment.
ROI is calculated by purchase price / net daily profit. For example, if the system (or GPU) purchase price is $300 USD and daily income is $2 USD (with electricity expenses already factored in), this means that the ROI is 150 days. Though in our case, the cost of a gaming laptop will be way more expensive than a pure mining rig.

To get to the bottom of this, we will use MSI GE76 Raider with Intel Core i9-10980HK processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphic as our mining rig. In order to minimize variables like comparing different mining pools and software, we will process the test with the NiceHash platform. The transaction structure is easy to understand as the following illustration. Although there are many other mining pools or platforms, that is not the subject of this article. We’ll leave it to everyone to study.

All you have to do is register an account and download the software, then you could start mining with easy GUI after the software benchmarking all the supported mining pools. As you can see when mining, the UI will show the real-time estimated profitability and the hash rate via Excavator miner with the DaggerHashimoto algorithm. This shows hash rate of RTX 3080 Laptop graphics is around 52.8 MH/s.

On a simple level, hash rate is the way we measure how much computing power everyone around the world is contributing toward mining. The below hash rate chart shows several desktop GPUs and GE76. Although MSI GE76 may not be the most cost-efficiency mining option, it shows comparable performance to a desktop RTX 3070.

↑ GE76 Raider with RTX 3080 Laptop GPU has pretty good hash rate

All there’s left is let this experiment run for one month and see whether mining with a gaming laptop is profitable. Come back next month to check our follow-up article and learn about the results.
Or you could also get a gaming laptop and try increase passive income and enjoy the game titles at the same time.