The Best Altcoins To Mine Using a Laptop or a PC in 2017
Even though I am a fond of huge in-house bitcoin mining rigs, I also love to experiment on PC altcoins’ mining, in an attempt to find the best altcoins one can mine using his/her PC. Accordingly, I decided to look through the altcoins one can mine with his PC and GPU. After researching through a considerable number of coins, which can be mined without ASICs, I found some interesting results.
My Laptop Specifications:
For this cryptocurrency mining experiment, I used my HP i5-5200U laptop which has an average CPU benchmark of 3543. Here are the detailed specifications of my machine:
Microprocessor Intel Core i5-5200U with Intel HD Graphics 5500 (2.2 GHz, 3 MB cache, 2 cores)
Memory 16 GB DDR3L SDRAM (2 x 8 GB)
My GPU Specifications:
My Graphic card is a NVIDIA GEFORCE 820M with an average GPU benchmark of 577. Here are the detailed specifications of my graphic card:
Model: GeForce 820M
Bus Interface: PCIe 2.0 x16, with a maximum memory Size of 2048 MB,
Core Clock(s): 954 MHz,
Graphics API Support: DirectX 11 OpenGL 4.5 Max
TDP: 15 W
My Operating system is Windows 10 64 bit
How The Results Of My Experiment Can Benefit You:
To estimate how much money you could make via using your PC or laptop to mine altcoins, you have to benchmark your CPU +/- your GPU. I recommend using PassMark Software to benchmark your CPU and GPU; it is free to use and can give you a relatively accurate estimate of the power of your machines. So, if your CPU has a benchmark of around 7000, you can make the double amount I made with my laptop and so on.
My Altcoin Mining Experiment:
I mined the following altcoins using my CPU +/- my GPU using pool mining. I excluded the mining fees of the pools from the results below. The following represents the amount of each coin I mined in 24 hours and its worth in USD.
Monero XMR:
Miner used: I used the open source Cryptonote AMD GPU miner for Windows. Please, note that the script is designed to utilize the AES-NI instruction sets.
Important – you might have to manually enable the AES-NI in your BIOS , as some manufacturers disable it by default. Your mining rate will be directly proportional to your CPU’s AES encryption speed.
Amount mined in 24 hours: 0.0128
Monero price on the 12th of December, 2016: 7.85 USD
Total amount earned after mining for 24 hours: 0.097 USD
Bytecoin BCN:
Miner used: I used Minergate’s mining software, as it is free to use, enables you combine CPU and GPU mining and also has a “smart mining” feature that automatically picks the best altcoins to mine based on market price.
Amount mined in 24 hours: 2,522 BCN
Bytecoin price on the 12th of December, 2016: 0.000046 USD
Total amount earned after mining for 24 hours: 0.116 USD
Fantomcoin FCN:
Miner used: The fantomcoin qt wallet. It is easy to use, allows you to use CPU and GPU mining and also enables you to also mine Bytecoin BCN, Quazarcoin QCN or Monero XMR while mining FCN using merged mining.
Amount mined in 24 hours: 0.205 FCN
Fantomcoin price on the 12th of December, 2016: 0.0341 USD
Total amount earned after mining for 24 hours: 0.07 USD
DigitalNote XDN:
Miner used: Minergate’s mining software. The great thing about XDN is that supports merged mining with XMR and other Cryptonote-based coins.
Amount mined in 24 hours: 666.1 XDN
DigitalNote price on the 12th of December, 2016: 0.00015 USD
Total amount earned after mining for 24 hours: 0.0999 USD
Other coins:
I tried mining Ethereum, AEON, DASH and Quazarcoin, but none of those yielded more than 0.05 USD after mining for 24 hours.
Conclusion:
Using your PC and Graphic card to mine altcoins can help you make a few cents per day utilizing a PC that you have hanging around your place doing nothing. Based on my experiment Bytecoin BCN, MemoryCoin MMC, MonetaVerde MCN and Fantomcoin FCN are the best altcoins to mine using a PC or a laptop. Always put into your consideration the price of the altcoin you choose to mine and always consider shifting to the coins whose prices are soaring!!