New Miner

Good Morning,

I purchased an rtx 3080 for gaming and found out through the process of actually finally ordering on (although its been on backorder since Dec 9th with no shipping day in sight....) that i could pay the card off by mining with it when i am not using it.

To test this out while waiting for the card, i bought a new gtx 1070 and 1060 (6gb) for $450 (hopefully not a terrible deal but i hope to make the cost back mining). I wanted to test it out on oldish cards for an extended time before i risked my 3080 on mining.

I am using Nicehash miner on both my main rig and my hobby rig in the basement. The 1060 in the basement has been running non-stop for 2 days in the basement now with no issues. The one upstairs is a different story. I have been plagued with Norton and Malwarebytes warning and blocks on the program. I ended up Creating a folder and giving it exceptions to all my antivirus, still had issues, so i had to actually disable permanently a portion of norton to get it to finally work (it was blocking internet traffic and i could not add any exceptions to it to make it work). So the card was finally mining, but then it would get a GPU error after mining for like only 15 min consistently.

My next try on the 1070 on my main rig was installing NHOS onto a flash drive, it worked fine and installed. Problems started when booting into it. It would state Rig not mining and Rig not connected. Its connected via ethernet. I tried adding the wifi credentials to the config file and that was to no avail. In the end, i have not been able to get my main rig to run.

My last issue with nicehash is that the probability is all over the spectrum, it jumps from $0.40 to $3.00 per 24h. Is this normal when your mining in a pool?

So my main question and reason for this post: Is nice hash a recommended program for mining and its operator error / antivirus hates mining, or is there a better option out there for a person who wants to get started with mining and has options to slowly add complexity to it by allowing gpu setting modifications to overclock vram, undervolt, etc.?

Im sure this info is posted in various locations, being new to this is quite daunting and i feel like it has a huge learning curve. If there is an article that you feel answers the main question of what program is best for beginners, i would greatly appreciate a link.

Thank you again! And im excited to join the community of mining!