How to gauge profitability vs. effort for a new miner but no utility bill?

Mining
1

I have a desktop and an old Thinkpad, free electricity, and a lot of curiosity about crypto, so I’m going to try my luck at mining ZEC
My desktop has a 3.6 Ghz quad-core processor, and the GPU is a AMD Radeon HD 6870

I’m almost finished downloading the blocks for ZEC, getting OpenCL to run for Optiminer, and reading about Dwarfpool, so as I gear up, I’d like to check in with the community to see if I’m missing anything, and what to expect. Is it worth setting everything up on the laptop as well? Even hooked up to a mining pool, I think it would just be a waste of time?

Is there any way to estimate how profitable this PC might be by the summer time? In three months would I make six cents or six hundred dollars?
Thanks for the help
-lessconfused

2

I’m running it on Ubuntu 17.04 currently if that’s useful information

3

If it isn’t the 2gb version, I don’t think it will work.
if it does at current pricing about $ 2.00 a day

1 Like
4

How do I check the version?
lspci | grep VGA
returns
'01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Barts XT [Radeon HD 6870]`
Would I get an error that it wouldn’t work, or it would just run uselessly?

5

I don’t know… it will not start, error out, or mine