Laptop CPU Mining

I know, I know… Generally looked upon as a foolish idea. I just had to see if anyone else is turning their laptop into a mining rig to supplement their desktop for some extra hashing power.

I’m mining on a Razer Blade 14" gaming laptop with an all aluminum chassis. It’s sitting on top of a good USB cooling pad. It has excellent heat distribution and typically runs far hotter while gaming for hours at a time.

At -t 6 I get close to 20 Sol/s and at -t 2 I’m getting around 9-10 Sol/s. Temps were stable at 78-80 degrees C with 6 threads running and 66-74 degrees C at 2 threads running. I’ve had this thing going for quite some time now at 2 threads with no issues, and it’s minimally warm to the touch - temp still ranging high 60’s to low 70’s.

Given one could pay close to $300 for 6 Sol/s of cloud mining through genesis, how bad of an idea could this be? Any thoughts/input? Would like to know if anyone thinks I may burn my laptop out going at this sustained clip. Admittedly it could be a stupid idea.

Not a stupid idea at all. In the future video cards might far outpace CPUs but for now who cares. At the very least the H/s and S/s info you gather and the fun is worth it.

I ported over an Ethereum mining rig with 6 video cards. I am also running 5 CPUs. One of which is a laptop.

The difference between CPUs and GPUs right now is not as much as one might think.

I’m using an old laptop right now just to learn mining. Getting .5 h/s
I don’t wanna run my macbook or gaming pc as a miner so I’m using an old HP until I build a proper rig

:slight_smile:

fun!

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Very nice guys. Thanks for the words of encouragement. It’s still nice to contribute to the network while at it too. Let me know how your exploits go.

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Been running my brand new gaming rig since the start and I just turn off the miner and restart the PC before I game. Not even a flutter of inconsistency. Use it if you got it man you’re not going to hurt that thing.

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Yeah ended up turning it on for a few hours went from .5 hash to 12-15! Now I want to find any pc I can and point em to my taddr LOL.

I’m mining on a laptop too!
It’s a i7-4800MQ quad core @2.70 GHz, and I’m getting 21-23 Sols/s with cpu only.
In comparison, gpu mining with my poor NVIDIA Quadro gives less than 2 additional Sols/s :disappointed:

Have 40 sol/s on MSI laptop with I7 5700HQ + 980m

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Right on. :sunglasses:

Impressive! Some full desktops are getting far less than that :blush: Good to know these are working out well for people. Mine is still chugging along without issue so far.

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I’m mining with my old MacBook Pro (from 2010). I get 1 Sol/s. So far I’ve earned 0.00008 ZEC. That’s not very much but I have a lot of fun an I’m happy to take part from the very first minute :grinning:

I was using my laptop at first for testing, 4930mx cpu

I have to say… It is not a bad desktop supplement at this point if my calculations are somewhat sound. The additional 10-20 sol/s I’m getting helps reach above 50 sol/s and coinwarz estimates a $5-8 gains/day at present. Not amazing, but not bad for the small guys. Granted, that could change.

Hi all, newbie here. I am currently mining on three devices: my MacBook Pro early 2015 (giving 10-11 Sols/s with the experimental nheqminer build from kost), a desktop (Core i5-4690S and an Asus ROG RX 480, so far tweaking there with nheqminer for CPU and genoil for the RX 480). The desktop gives around 35-40 Sols/s on the RX480 (stock) and another 15-20 Sols/s when all four cores are running on the CPU.

But I divert. I have an old but reliable Dell XPS 17 laptop (L702x), which has a quad-core i7 2670QM an an onboard GeForce GT555M card. I am able to run nheqminer and mine from both the CPU and GPU. My concern comes with heating. that system runs at 2.2 GHz / core and turbo boost allows to reach up to 3.1 GHz. I’ve been able to see mining rates at up to 17 Sols/s however this degrades very rapidly as soon as the CPU starts heating, which causes the frequency to throttle down. I was thinking if there is any mechanism I could use to kind of “schedule” mining or put delays between blocks. Or if I should mine on a lower number of cores.

Also, since the CPU is 4 core / 8 thread, does it makes sense to mine on all threads or just focus on the physical cores. I think I’ll try to answer myself by testing several configurations.

In any case thanks for your comments!

so how much total hashing power do you have? And how much Zcash are you earning per day?

you might be better off selling the laptop and building a single GPU card mining rig. You’d get 300 H/s with an RX480 8G. And you probably want to use Claymore or Optiminer instead of Genoil to get that 300 H/s

Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll try Claymore / Optiminer later today and will check on the H/s. I’m mining on the suprnova pool and I’m getting reports of about 60-80 Sols/s. In terms of earned zCash/day it varies but is so far a low number. I started mining on Feb-9 and got the RX480 two days later. So far I’ve amassed a whooping 0.00791665 ZEC. I might get a dedicated rig later with a couple RX480 cards.

Thanks!

Another update: I did clean up the fan and air circulation on the laptop last night (minimally clogged) and more importantly applied new thermal paste (system is from 2012). After 15 mins uptime and running a total of 3 processes (2x 2 threads + 1 GPU) I am mining at approx 13 sols/sec on the system. CPU frequency has stabilized so far. It’s early to say how the system will behave on the long run but it seems “promising”.

You can start your own open rig GPU miner for very little money. Especially if you have any kind of desktop board with PCI-E slots. I built my first few open rig frames out of wood.

You can use whatever board, process, memory, drive, and power you have around. As you get more GPU’s, you can upgrade each part to add more.

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I’ve checked openminer and we’re now running at approx 250/300 Sols/s on the RX480 only - quite a huge difference and we didn’t start looking at optimizations yet. I checked your site earlier and you have some great tutorials there. If we decide to go for a rig we’ll surely follow those. Thanks for the help & for sharing!

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Can I use my old laptop to run 6 gpu’s for mining? I am getting 115 Sols/s with my gaming laptops 965m so I want to run some 1060’s or 50’s. I just can’t find much about building a rig with a laptop. I did know you can run 1 external gpu with a laptop with stuff from this site[ [PE4H ( PCIe passive adapter ver2.4 )] but their instructions aren’t in english.

I would love some advice. I’m itching to get started!