So you bought or built a beast-mode GPU miner a year or so ago and mining is becoming unprofitable. What should you do? Sell your rig to some sucker that is just getting into crypto? (No.... you should not do that). Turn it off and store it hoping someday it will be worth millions when one of your great great grandchildren take it on the Antique Roadshow? In this post I hope to give you some secondary use cases for your obsolete GPU mining rigs.
1. Crack Passwords: Cracking passwords is a very repetitive specific computation which is very similar to mining cryptocurrencies. There are quite a few open-source password cracking software packages that can leverage GPUs paired with Rainbow Tables to make for a very efficient password cracking rig. CryptoHaze is just one example of this type of software.
2. Image Rendering Cryptocurrency: Projects like Golem are a perfect fit for mining rigs. Golem is a project that is currently focused on decentralized image rendering that leverages GPUs to perform the decentralized image rendering tasks. Basically you install the Golem software and rent out your unused GPU cycles to help users of the Golem network complete their image rendering tasks..... and get paid for it. 💲 👍
3. Gaming: The high-end GPUs that you bought to mine all of those precious cryptoz were designed to play high-end PC games. This means that even though you might not be interested in gaming..... there are tons of people who are. Sell your rig a la carte as there will definitely be buyers out there in the interwebz that are willing to buy obsolete mining GPUs for their gaming pleasure.
4. AI / Neural Networks Rig: The world of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, neural networks is becoming very popular. Many of the open frameworks to run models leverage GPUs to perform the complex computations. If you fell like learning about some AI...... take a look at some of the top open-source frameworks.
So these are just a few ways you can make use of your obsolete GPU mining rig........ Hopefully it give you some ideas to tinker around with. Let me know if you can think of a few more to add to the list!!!
Cheers!
-Michael