The Steam Deck is a fun, portable, and surprisingly powerful gaming rig released by Valve in 2022. Since then, DIYers, modders, and hackers have been having a field day trying to push the handheld device to its limits.
With the world just now getting over an unprecedented semiconductor shortage, many spent the last few years looking for alternatives to hard-to-find GPUs for use in the then-booming crypto market. The Steam Deck seemed like it might be the perfect companion for a world-be miner with limited hardware.
Can you use the Steam Deck to mine crypto? Sort of.
Digging Deeper – What Do Miners Use?
While, in theory, anyone can start mining, there’s a bit more to it than that. As mentioned, you need some pretty powerful hardware to have a chance at solving the equations required in anything close to a timely manner. Serious mining operations use custom-built high-end specialty rigs to do one thing—mine.
However, these are extremely expensive, large, and consume tremendous amounts of power. A top-of-the-line mining rig can require more than 3 kW/h and needs to run 24/7/365 running at more than 100 TH/s (terra-hashes per second) to have any real value. Even then, each rig returns only a few dollars a day, according to this calculator.
With these restrictions, it’s little wonder that many have looked for alternative options for how to mine crypto effectively. Whether it’s to try and turn a profit or to see if they can, people have managed to mine crypto on a wide range of devices—with mixed results.
Game Consoles
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that game consoles were one of the first alternatives people looked at. As some of the most powerful hardware that many people have access to, they seem like an obvious choice. In some cases, they are more than powerful enough to run even some the most demanding titles, while as with banking games and less GPU/CPU complex in-browser time-killers, they are easily handled (no pun intended).
One Reddit user took it upon themselves to share their work with the masses. ETH-box works on Xbox One, Series S, and Series X and can successfully mine at a rate of about 3 MH/s. That’s a far cry from anything useful, but the creator is confident that he can get that up to 30 MH/s with enough support.
But the beautiful thing about consoles is that they are—comparatively—cheap. It’s possible to link hundreds or thousands of consoles together to maximize returns. In fact, in 2010, the US Air Force combined 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles to form a massive supercomputer. At the time, the 500 TFlops computer was the fastest in the entire US Department of Defense.
More than a decade later, in 2021, a group of crypto scammers was uncovered illegally using nearly 4,000 PlayStation 4s off of the city’s power grid. At first, the assumption was that these people were using these for crypto mining, but after digging a little deeper, the truth was uncovered. They were mining, but for FUT Coins for use in FIFA 2021.
The Steam Deck – Handheld Mining?
The Steam Deck might seem like an odd choice for something as intensive as crypto mining, but Valve’s little device packs a punch. After all, it was designed from the ground up to run the latest and most demanding games. A task that, by all accounts, it largely accomplishes.
How Powerful Is It?
Sporting a 3.5GHz AMD Zen2 CPU and a 1.6 GHz 8 RDNA GPU, the Steam Deck is on par with many home consoles and more than capable of running any major PC release. So does it have the power to mine crypto?
Yes. Technically. With a fairly open architecture, there’s nothing preventing you from installing a new OS (the stock one does have limitations that will prevent you from installing all the necessary software) and treating your device just like a very small PC.
The Steam Deck’s GPU clocks in at 1.6 TFlops. That’s an impressive figure for something so small, but when compared to truly cutting-edge GPUs like Nvidia’s RTX A4000, the comparison falls flat, with the latter being able to perform more than 10x as many operations per second.
Is It Worth It?
Ultimately, whether or not any endeavor is “worth it” is up to you. With that said, just how much could you expect to mine with a Steam Deck? Not a lot.
According to at least one report, someone actually did get their Stem Deck up and running and successfully mining crypto. Their speed? A whopping 1,200 H/s. That’s not a typo. Not terra-hashes. Not mega-hashes. 1,200 hashes per second. That is, to put it bluntly, not good. It’s a little half of what was reported on an Xbox and about 1/50th of an RTX 3090.
Put simply, there is just no way to ever turn any profit by mining crypto on a Steam Deck. You’re more likely to destroy your fancy handheld in the process.
The Overheating Issue
Ask any gamer, computers get hot. Many standard CPUs operate in the 40–65°C range and can easily get up to 80°C during heavy use. The issue is mostly avoided in large PCs built to dissipate this heat, but anyone who’s ever tried gaming with a laptop knows that their lap is the worst palace for it.
The Steam Deck is a handheld device, so heat displacement was a real factor in its design. Even then, some games can push the device’s temperature to more than 90°C. Mining crypto is easily just as intensive as any game and takes significantly longer. The Deck is designed for beginning throttling performance at 100°C and for completely powering off at 105°C.
Leaving your handheld running for days/weeks/months to mine crypto would be the fastest way to destroy it.
So, yes, you absolutely 100% can mine crypto on a Steam Deck. But you really, really shouldn’t.
