Wouldn’t an electric space heater provide more heat per watt? This isn’t a rhetorical question because I don’t know the answer. It’s just my intuition that something designed to produce heat would do that more efficiently than something designed to do computations that produces heat as a side effect.
Basically, heat is waste. A space heater is a resistor causing 0% efficient usage.
If 500 watts of electricity go into a heater or a computer, 500 watts of heat will come out, minus some light from leds and screen, some electricity on the ethernet cable, and other of these ignorable things.
If it does some usefull computation on the side, that's nice, but energy wise a 500 watt game computer is just as efficient as a 500 watt heater, if used for heating purposes.
No it's same thing. All energy eventually becomes heat and there can be no lost energy in a system. In the case of a GPU we're converting electrical energy into thermal energy, and some mechanical and sound energy due to the fans. So a GPU should just as efficient at producing heat as a space heater, it's just that the electricity goes through a few more steps first.
Of course, but what he's saying is that you don't generate currency as a side effect of running your dedicated heater. Whereas the inverse is true with mining - you generate heat as a side effect of running your mining setup. When that's desirable, it can be factored into the net cost.
