If you want to mine on CPU, buy Ryzen 2000, 3000 & 5000 series from the second hand market.
3000 & 5000 series basically have same performance for most mining algorithms. Ryzen 1000 just might work if you get them for free as I see people offloading them for real cheap these days. But power consumption might not be optimal for the performance.
They are usually cheap enough for it to be "manageable" if you are adventurous to take a potential no win scenario but just break even.
Don't buy the newest stuff because you will never get back the investment in time.
I don't do this myself but looked into it briefly at times. It's never profitable to put in as a investment but if you have a large cache of used parts it could be done as a side hobby.
If you are upgrading your main PC just for the latest & greatest, your old PC's could be used for this unless you want to hand it over to someone else to be sold or such as parts.
Used parts market have a large supply of potential cheap processors to be used these days with decent performance per unit to be much better than buying the newest generation.
Though GPU mining is much easier to setup & get a return faster.
The payback of such a computer in mining is very doubtful, most likely never. Have you studied processor prices now? The Ryzen 1000, 2000, 3000 and 5000 series processors do not have motherboards for multi-processor installation, so for each processor you have a lot of additional costs for components and additional power consumption when mining.3000 & 5000 series basically have same performance for most mining algorithms. Ryzen 1000 just might work if you get them for free as I see people offloading them for real cheap these days. But power consumption might not be optimal for the performance.
They are usually cheap enough for it to be "manageable" if you are adventurous to take a potential no win scenario but just break even.
Don't buy the newest stuff because you will never get back the investment in time.
I don't do this myself but looked into it briefly at times. It's never profitable to put in as a investment but if you have a large cache of used parts it could be done as a side hobby.
If you are upgrading your main PC just for the latest & greatest, your old PC's could be used for this unless you want to hand it over to someone else to be sold or such as parts.
Used parts market have a large supply of potential cheap processors to be used these days with decent performance per unit to be much better than buying the newest generation.
Though GPU mining is much easier to setup & get a return faster.
Exactly.You can only profit if you have already build computers with such processors that for example like I have permission to use work PC-s to do whatever I like as long as I get the job done,you may have also permission of doing so and this means you are mining free of cost and you can try any CPU coins,I have gone with Raptoreum and this is a gamble I am more than willing to make as if this coin hits its previous all time high of almost 0.09 I would be a very happy man and I would be a super happy man if it reaches a new all time high in the next bull run.
I would probably pay my employee an extra $40 a month so that he does not do extraneous business on working PCs, which after mining will need more frequent cleaning and replacement of thermal paste and of course a good cooling system.