Graphics cards with AMD's RX 500 and Vega series and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 10 GPUs have been sold out for months (almost) and are also very expensive. The reason? They are bought on a massive scale to mine cryptocoins such as Ethereum and Zcash. Not a nice development for gamers, but unfortunately a fact we can't ignore. It's time for us to find out which GPUs perform best in mining.

If you want to start mining, you can do so in two ways. The simplest method is to use a video card that you already have at times when you are not actively using it. A gaming PC that is really only used a few hours a day, you can of course use the rest of the time to mine. If that's the case, and you don't have to recoup the investment of the video card, it's especially important to look at the energy consumption of your PC. In the Netherlands, energy is paid for at a price of around 20 eurocents per kilowatt hour. As a result, older CPUs quickly consume more energy than they generate in terms of mining. However, with modern video cards from AMD's RX 400 and 500 series and Nvidia's GeForce 10 models, you can still mine profitably.