Ethereum gas fees are through the roof right now. Here’s how you can take advantage of this by mining on your gaming computers.

Despite what most people think, mining ethereum on a personal computer can be quite profitable if you have a good graphics card with at least 6 gb of vram. My pc with an rx 5700 xt currently makes me 7usd worth of eth per day while barely using a dollar of electricity.

Before you start, you need to know that mining can be quite heavy on the vram, meaning that even if the gpu core can have a good temperature, its vram will be reaching way higher temps. Due to this, you'll have to check the junction temps and make sure they stay below 90c so you can avoid any damage. In order to keep the temperatures low, you'll need to undervolt your card and adjust the fan curve. You can do this through MSI afterburner. Just keep lowering the power limit until you find a spot that will not affect your hashrate significantly. My GPU is currently undervolted from 220w to 155w, and it's running without any significant hashrate loss.

Now let's get to the mining part. There are two ways you can mine.

The first (and the easiest one) is with Nicehash.

Nicehash is a platform where you can rent out your mining power to other people who will pay you in bitcoin to mine for them. You generally make the same amount you would by mining ethereum, but you're getting paid in bitcoin. It's a good choice if you only want bitcoin, but if you prefer ethereum better mine it directly since you'll save money in transaction and exchange fees.

Nicehash is pretty easy to use. You just make an account, download their software and start mining. They have a video showing the whole procedure on their channel.

The 2nd way you can mine, is by downloading a mining software and using a mining pool.

The easiest way to do this is with AwesomeMiner. It's a miner management software. It downloads all the miners you need automatically and you can choose whichever one you like the most. It also makes configuring everything way easier.

In order to start mining with it, you'll first need to configure a pool. I use Flexpool, mainly because it has a low minimum payout of 0.05 eth, and it doesn't need me to make an account.

click on new pool, and then add pool. It'll open a window with a bunch of options.

You can leave the description field empty or just add a nickname. On pool connection you need to add your pool's url, in my case it was eth-de.flexpool.io:4444. In order to find what url you need to use for your region go to https://flexpool.io/en/docs/help/. On worker name you can add whatever you want, think of it as your computer's name, your pc will show up on your pool with that name. Leave the worker. password field empty.

On the coin field you need to choose Ethereum (ETH). On the wallet address field you need to put your ethereum wallet address. leave the personalization string and notes fields empty and click ok. Now your pool is added.

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Now you need to add a Miner.

Click on add new miner, then click on "managed miner" and click next, add a name (description) to it, and leave the managed host at local. After that, you'll need to choose an algorithm, a miner, and a pool. On algorithm you need to choose Ethereum. On Mining software, choose NBMiner, leave dual mode at disabled, and then at pool choose the pool you added earlier. then click next and you're finished.

Now all you need to do is right click on your miner and click on start. After that you're done.

After you've mined for around 5-10 minutes you'll need to go to flexpool.io and enter your ethereum wallet address to the search field. It will open your dashboard when you can see your miner's stats.

There's also a beta version of flexpool's website ( beta.flexpool.io ) which will show you some extra stats like your daily income.

Flexpool's minimum withdrawal amount is at 0.1 eth by default so you have to click on settings and change it to 0.05 to get paid sooner.

After that you'll receive the eth in you wallet automatically every time you've mined 0.05 eth.

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Oh, and before you start mining, just make sure you'll not lose money by paying more in electricity that you earn. Nicehash has a profitability calculator on their website and you can use it to make sure that you'll actually make profit and you won't be losing money from the electricity you're gonna be using.

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edit: I forgot to mention that if you want to help with medical research while still making a small profit you can use your computing power to help medical research with folding@home and get paid in banano. You can check it out here https://bananominer.com/