Bitcoin Forum

Electrical energy goes into my GPU and changes to heat energy.

Is 100% of the energy being changed to heat when mining, or is there a small portion that is still electricity? The data bits I am sending to the BTC network must still be electrical energy, right?

You have a weird idea of how a telephone line or a network works :)

When you receive or transmit data your network card absorbs from the network approximately the same energy it emits. All this energy doesn't go somewhere: simply becomes heat.

Maybe there's some microscopic entropy change when finding the right nonce from all the possibilities.

But when I watch a picture on my screen, some of the electricity (data bits) that are being transferred to the monitor will become light energy when the monitor displays it.

When that light strikes something it will convert into heat.*  Energy is never lost only converted.

Computers (including bitcoin miners) do no WORK in the physics sense of the word.  Thus for all practical purposes 100% of the electrical energy becomes thermal energy (heat).

Run a miner which pulls 1 KW from the wall for 1 hour and you have 1 kWh electricity in, 1 kWh heat out.  

*If the light passes through your window some of the energy may convert into heat outside your house but for all intents and purposes this is a negligible rounding error.

i say this with all respect, but are you an idiot? your sceen is connected to a power source that provides all the power = light. the data from your computer is carried in a fraction of a watt, and simply tells the screen where to point the power to make light on a pixel

In theory, 100% of the energy is converted to heat but not as efficient as a heater... no matter what the electricity is used for, it will still product heat for that part....

An electric (resistance) heater is also 100% efficient.  Any resistance load is equally efficient.  It can't be more or less.

But not all heaters work by resistance. A heat pump will provide about 3 to 5 times as much heat as the electricity it consumes, and is therefore the obvious choice for anyone who cares about their electricity bill, or who wants to confuse the Hell out of people who think they understand thermodynamics but don't.

True I guess it might just be geography but around here nobody calls a heat pump a heater.

Thanks for the explanation, I remember reading somewhere a good heat pump can produce 5 BTU per watt instead of 1 BTU... oh well...

Yes, 100% energy goes to heat, If you want to reduce heat use platinum PSU.. it would save about 5-20% depending on your current PSU..

To clarify a heatpump can MOVE 3W to 5W (not BTU) for every 1W used.  It is simply moving heat from outside to inside (in winter) or heat from inside to outside (in summer).

You going to heat your house with GPU? You better think twice cause I see some forum member saying there is weird smell while GPU mining. It might have serious side effect.....

Anybody know anything about the smell? I had GPU in my house but it doesn't seems to smell bad...

Your GPU should smell like $$.

No it smells like burned metal....

Mined with 3 GPUs for a year. No smells. Only heat. Clean the GPUs of dust and consider re-oiling the fans occasionally.

Well, it smells for me, I later find out that its due to my PSU overheating and the smell came from capacitor...

Tends to happen when you burn silicon. Blew up 3 PSUs in one week, two of them were chained together, and the third was the was actually the first one that blew up, necessitating the other two. My setup with those two would have made any 2011 bitcoin miner proud. :D (I'm not surprised the two that were chained together blew up.)

Did you use more power then your PSU can handle? I usually use about 15% of their capacity....

Winter time is the best time for mining. No heater on and you can smell money in the air. LOL. Summers are brutal. Got to monitor temps all the time on the gpu's. Moving fan's and trying to keep them cool. A lot of work but in the end it is worth it.

On my former primary one? About 2/3s capacity. On the chained ones? About 2/3s of the combined 12V rail capacity, but one was 11 years old and sat outside in a shed for 5, and the other was an off-brand OEM Dell one. The chained ones worked for a good 7 hours before they blew up though!

Miners give off MASSIVE amounts of heat. I would also agree with your thought that they give off electrical energy somehow.

What do you mean by electrical energy?

Woohoo, I never blow up my PSU yet.... working well for 4 months now...