Can you still mine with a GPU in 2025? What are the returns? I recently tried mining with an NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti, and after a few days of mining I’m here to break down whether it’s still viable.
First, the setup: this machine was originally built to run LLMs with Ollama, which is why it has a modified NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti with 22 GB of VRAM, 128 GB of DDR4 memory, and an Intel Xeon E5-2690 v4 CPU. Mining uses the GPU only; the rest of the system is nearly idle and can be ignored. When the card isn’t running large models it just sits there, so I figured — why not mine?
Sustained high load and high temperatures age a GPU and shorten its lifespan. So instead of the stock 260W power limit, I manually set it to 150W, keeping the core temperature below 70°C — it’s currently hovering around 65°C. That way, long mining sessions won’t wear the hardware down too much.
Hashrate and earnings
Forget BTC and LTC with a GPU — you can’t compete with dedicated ASICs. So I mine Ravencoin (RVN), which uses the KawPow algorithm, designed specifically to resist ASICs and well suited to GPU mining.
- With my NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti power-limited to 150W, the hashrate is around 25 Mh/s.
- As of this writing, total Ravencoin (RVN) network hashrate is 3.77 Th/s.
- The Ravencoin network finds a block roughly every 1 minute, with a current block reward of 2500 RVN.
- As of this writing, Ravencoin (RVN) trades at $0.01347.
- I mine about 21 RVN per day, which is $0.28287 — roughly ¥2.0171. Two yuan a day.
Now let’s do the math. The GPU runs at 150W, but there’s also the CPU, memory, drives and everything else — my X99 build draws about 260W total, or 0.26 kW. Over a day that’s 6.24 kWh; at ¥0.5 per kWh, that’s ¥3.12 in electricity.
Electricity costs ¥3.12 while the mined coins sell for ¥2.0171. Add in the hardware itself, and mining loses about ¥1.10 a day. Making a profit from mining is simply not possible right now.
Other uses
Some people worry that depositing funds into exchanges is unsafe, or that their accounts might get frozen. For them, mining coins yourself and depositing those into an exchange to swap for USDT is a workable path — it loses a little money, but it’s completely risk-free and no one can question where the funds came from.
So as a small side experiment, mining for fun and dripping a bit of coin into your exchange account every day is perfectly fine.