I was lucky enough to snag a RTX3080, and I’ve been mining Ethereum basically 24/7 for the past month or two - primarily with the goal of funding the card itself, which I bought originally for gaming! I don’t expect I’ll run it long term, and there is the upcoming transition to proof of stake on Ethereum anyway which will hopefully curtail a lot of the global energy burn anyway (at least for ETH).
I’ve had a smart plug (running ESPSense, natch) upstream of my PC collecting data, and the mining software I use also provides some detail on power consumption of just the GPU.
The entire PC generally pulls a consistent 286-290W while mining, and the miner says about 218W of that is for the GPU itself. So ~70W of overhead for all the other components, which seems reasonable to me - mostly idle CPU/memory/NVMe drive, but about 5 fans running at decent speeds to keep temperatures down. Fortunately my build is quiet enough while mining to sit on my desk next to me while I work from home.
A few screenshots:
I’m sure mining like this will reduce the lifespan of the card, but if it pays for itself before then (which it already almost has), I’ll consider that a wash? While the mining profitability varies day to day and is rather high right now, you can see from that screenshot that it will earn back the monthly energy cost of mining in just 24 hours.
At that profitability the monthly projected income is around $660, for an energy cost of $15-20/mo (for my rates). What’s not captured in those screenshots is the cost of providing additional general cooling, aka my home AC, although that’s not going to be a substantial amount compared to earnings either.