A couple years ago I built a mining rig with 5 GPU cards. I stopped running it because our electricity prices shot up after a change of provincial government removed the price cap, at the same time crypto prices dropped.
Today, it seems even with one unaccelerated GPU out of my old hardware collection, BTC is back to profitability.
Our electricity is $0.09 CAD/kwh right now.
Must be much more efficient with modern, overclocked and cooled cards?
Going to look at moving stuff around. My gaming computer is a compact unit with only one expansion slot, but I have another PC with a beefier power supply and more slots.
Other than money, why mine?
As a bonus, the machine is warming my hobby room. I would be paying to heat the place anyway, so that is like my heater subsidizing itself!
That's nothing. This guy grows tomatoes with his excess heat!
But also there is something truly educational about building a PC again after decades away from the field. You understand your machine better when you start from a blank slate.
There was a period at the beginning of the "PC as games machine" era, when we were upgrading from 286, to 386, to 486, etc, that there were savings to be had by doing your own work. Dell and co made that less true over time, to where their volume purchasing and the big box store price gouging made me give up.
Perhaps those days are back again?