Frequently Asked Questions

Yes - in fact a gaming PC is almost ideal. The same CPU and GPU you use for games will mine Malairte well. Many miners run the software in the background or overnight when they are not gaming. Just keep an eye on temperatures and dust, and consider running at reduced power for longer hardware life.

No, you do not need a dedicated mining motherboard for a typical home setup. Any modern consumer board with one full-length PCIe slot is enough to start mining Malairte with a single GPU and your existing CPU. The dedicated mining motherboards you see online, with six or more PCIe slots, were built for the Ethereum era and are overkill for most home miners. If you plan to run two or three GPUs in the same machine, look for a regular ATX board with two physical x16 slots spaced at least three slots apart, and at least one extra x4 or x1 slot for flexibility. B550, X570, B650, and X670 boards on the AMD side, or Z690 and Z790 on Intel, are all sensible choices. Avoid the cheapest entry-level boards as their VRMs are not built for sustained load.

A typical home mining PC running one mid-range GPU and a modern six- or eight-core CPU pulls between 250 and 400 watts at the wall under sustained load. The GPU is usually the biggest share, drawing 130 to 220 watts depending on the model and any power limits you have set. The CPU adds 65 to 125 watts when fully loaded, less if you are only running it at partial utilisation. Motherboard, RAM, drives, and case fans together rarely exceed 30 watts. If you add a second GPU you can expect another 130 to 220 watts on top. Over a month of continuous mining, a 300 watt setup uses about 216 kilowatt-hours, which gives you a concrete number to multiply by your local electricity rate when you plan your budget.

Yes, with reasonable precautions. Modern CPUs and GPUs are designed to run at full load for extended periods, and Malairte mining is not categorically harder on hardware than a long gaming session or video render. What changes under 24/7 use is wear-and-tear pace: fan bearings, thermal paste, and thermal pads age faster. To keep a gaming PC happy while mining, set a sensible power limit on your GPU (around 70 to 80 percent of stock), use a fan curve that ramps slowly rather than spiking, repaste the CPU every 12 to 18 months, and blow dust out monthly. Avoid running your CPU and GPU at their thermal limits constantly; aim for sustained GPU temperatures under 75C and CPU temperatures under 80C. Your hardware will last comfortably for years.

Used is almost always the better value for home Malairte mining, provided you inspect carefully. The flood of post-Ethereum used GPUs has kept second-hand prices for cards like the RTX 3060, RTX 3070, and RX 6700 XT well below retail, and even after factoring in a thermal repad and repaste you typically come out ahead. The catch is that some of those cards were run hard for years. Ask the seller for HWiNFO screenshots, inspect fans and backplate in photos, and insist on a boot test before paying. A new card with a manufacturer warranty makes sense if you value the peace of mind, or if you are buying a current-generation GPU that has not yet hit the used market in volume. For most home miners on a budget, a carefully chosen used mid-range card is the right call.

No, water cooling is not required to mine Malairte on a CPU. A quality dual-tower air cooler from a known brand will keep modern Ryzen and Intel CPUs comfortably below their thermal limits even under sustained mining loads. Air coolers have one major advantage for 24/7 mining: they have no pump, no coolant, and no risk of a leak onto the GPU sitting underneath. All-in-one liquid coolers do have their place, especially for higher-end CPUs in cases with poor top clearance, but they introduce a wear component (the pump) that will likely need replacing every three to four years under continuous load. For a typical home mining build with a six- or eight-core CPU, spend your money on a generous air cooler rather than an AIO. It will be quieter, simpler, and more reliable over the long run.

For a single-GPU home mining build, 80 PLUS Bronze is the acceptable minimum, but 80 PLUS Gold is the sweet spot and the one most miners should target. The 80 PLUS rating measures how efficiently a power supply converts wall power into usable DC power, with higher tiers wasting less energy as heat. A Gold-rated unit running at its efficient load band wastes meaningfully less power than a Bronze unit, which adds up over months of continuous mining and also means a cooler, quieter PSU fan. Platinum and Titanium units cost more for smaller additional gains, so they only make sense if your electricity is expensive and the rig runs around the clock. Whatever tier you choose, buy from a reputable brand. A genuine Bronze unit beats a fake Gold one every time.

Far fewer than people assume. For Malairte mining, a GPU does most of its work on its own onboard VRAM, so the PCIe link to the motherboard carries relatively little traffic once mining begins. A second card running at electrical x4, or even x1 through a riser, will mine at essentially the same rate as one in a full x16 slot. The slot width matters far more for gaming and large data transfers than for the steady-state mining workload. This is good news for home builders, because it means you can use a motherboard whose second physical x16 slot is wired to only x4 lanes, which is extremely common on consumer boards. The one thing to confirm is that the slot is physically long enough to seat the card or that you have a quality riser to reach it.

Almost always this is thermal throttling, not damage. When a GPU gets too hot, it automatically reduces its clock speed to protect itself, which shows up as a drop in mining performance after the card has warmed up for a while. The fix is to improve cooling rather than to worry about the hardware. Check that case airflow is adequate, that fans are clean and spinning, and that the card is not starved of intake air. On a used card, dried thermal paste and worn memory pads are common culprits and respond well to a repaste and repad. Setting a power limit of 70 to 80 percent also reduces heat substantially and often eliminates throttling outright while barely affecting hashrate. Sustained throttling is a cooling problem to solve, not a sign your GPU is failing.

You can mine Malairte on a laptop technically, but it is generally a poor idea for anything beyond brief experimentation. Laptops are built to dissipate heat in short bursts, not to sustain full load for hours or days. Their compact cooling, small fans, and tightly packed components mean that continuous mining drives temperatures high and shortens the life of the battery, the fans, and the thermal solution. Laptop GPUs are also power-limited versions of their desktop counterparts, so they deliver less work for the heat they produce. If you simply want to try mining and see how the software behaves, a short laptop session is fine. For any ongoing mining you intend to leave running, a desktop with proper airflow and a power supply built for sustained load is the right tool and will cost you far less in the long run.

A good surge protector is strongly recommended, and an uninterruptible power supply is worth considering if you run a node. Because a mining PC runs continuously, it is exposed to every power fluctuation, spike, and brownout your mains delivers over months. A quality surge protector defends the power supply and components from spikes for a modest cost and is sensible for any always-on machine. A UPS goes further, providing battery backup that lets the system ride out brief outages and shut down cleanly during longer ones, which protects against data corruption. This matters most if you run a node, where an abrupt power loss can damage the chain database and force a lengthy re-sync. For a mining-only PC, a surge protector is the practical baseline. For a node, the added safety of a UPS is usually worth it.