Guide
Mining on a gaming PC: what an idle NVIDIA GPU earns
Updated September 2026 · honest numbers, sunk compute only
A gaming PC spends most of the day doing nothing. If it's already powered on, a modern NVIDIA card and a decent CPU can earn a little crypto in that idle time — not a business, but real, if small, money — quoted gross throughout. Pasiv is a one-button, non-custodial way to do it on Windows (and macOS/Linux): install, connect a wallet or paste a USDT address, press start. The pool pays your address directly, in USDT; Pasiv never holds your money.
Read this first, because most sites won't say it: every figure here is gross, before electricity. The whole idea is sunk compute: a machine that's running anyway. Pasiv shows the estimated $/day before you start, so you can weigh it against your own electricity price — the one number we won't guess for you.
What mines what
- Your graphics card mines Pearl, paid in USDT. It needs an NVIDIA card, Turing generation or newer (RTX 20-series and up, or GTX 16-series), with 3 GB+ of VRAM — or, in beta, an AMD Radeon RX 6000, 7000 or 9000 with 4 GB+ (beta because we haven't yet verified it on AMD hardware of our own). Installs on the older direct route can pick Ravencoin (≥6 GB) per card instead, until 1 November 2026.
- Your CPU mines Monero on RandomX at the same time — so the whole machine earns, not just the graphics card. (On the direct route the CPU can also mine Zephyr or Salvium until 1 November 2026, and an opt-in Auto mode keeps it on whichever pays most.)
Roughly what to expect
Honest framing beats a made-up table, so these are cards we run ourselves, measured end-to-end — not a calculator's guess:
| Card | Coin | Measured | $/day (GPU) | ≈ $/month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 4060 | Pearl (PearlHash) | ~57 TH/s | ≈ $1.35 | ≈ $41 |
| RTX 4070 SUPER | Pearl (PearlHash) | ~135 TH/s | ≈ $3.20 | ≈ $96 |
| RTX 4060 | Ergo (Autolykos2) | ~70 MH/s | ~$0.07 | ~$2.20 |
| RTX 4060 | Ravencoin (KawPow) | ~15.8 MH/s | ~$0.09 | ~$2.80 |
| Your card | live | detected | shown in-app | — |
Measured on our own lab rigs. Pearl rows are live (our measured hashrate at today's price and network difficulty); Ergo and Ravencoin dollar figures recomputed 13 September 2026. The spread is the point: which coin you mine matters far more than which card you own. Pearl earns more than ten times what Ravencoin or Ergo does on the same 4060, which is why Pasiv's GPU mines Pearl by default.
Want the per-card breakdown? What each NVIDIA card actually earns has measured figures for the 4060 and 4070 SUPER.
Pearl is a small, volatile coin — these numbers move with its price and network difficulty, so treat them as a recent reading rather than a promise. The app shows your card's live estimate the moment it detects it, and the calculator lets you check before you download.
The Windows part nobody warns you about
Windows treats miners as suspicious by policy, and we'd rather you hear it from us than get spooked mid-install:
- SmartScreen may still prompt while a newly issued signature builds download reputation — but the installer is code-signed, so it names a publisher rather than reporting an unknown one. Click More info → Run anyway.
- Smart App Control (on by default on new Windows 11) can block the GPU miner by reputation. There's genuinely no way to sign or allowlist around it — the app detects it and says so rather than silently doing nothing. CPU mining is unaffected.
- Pasiv will never tell you to add antivirus exclusions for the whole system; at most it asks once, opt-in, to allow the one GPU-miner file.
Frequently asked questions
Is mining on a gaming PC actually worth it?
Only as sunk compute. An idle NVIDIA GPU plus the CPU can earn cents to a low dollar a day, gross — see the per-card table above. Weigh that against your own electricity price; Pasiv shows the estimate before you start so you can judge it.
Will mining damage my GPU or shorten its life?
Mining is a sustained load like a long gaming session or a render — heat and fan wear are the real factors, not some special "mining damage." Keep the case cool and it's a normal heavy workload. Pasiv also has a governor that eases off under thermal pressure, and you can stop it any time.
Can I mine and game at the same time?
You can, but you shouldn't want to — the miner and the game would fight over the GPU and both would stutter. The point is the idle time: mine when you're not gaming. Stop it from the tray with one click before you launch a game (or just pause it).
Does it hold my coins or need an account?
No to both. You connect a wallet or paste your own USDT address, and the mining pool pays it directly — Pasiv has no wallet, no balance, and never asks for a key. There's no signup. Pasiv's cost is a 4% time-sliced fee, only while mining, logged in the app next to a public fee address. The pool (unMineable, 0.75%) and the mining engine take their own small fees, listed in the whitepaper.
Windows · macOS · Linux · no account · stop any time