Can you mine FLOP on a home GPU? RTX 5090, 4090 and 5080 explained

Last checked November 9, 2026 (Europe/Lisbon). Yes, by Flop's own rules a home GPU can mine FLOP if it has at least 16 GB of VRAM. On November 8 Arthur Hayes posted that "you don't need to rent crazy high spec GPUs to mine FLOP" (our story). This page collects what Flop's official FAQ and miner manual say about consumer cards. All figures come from draft documents and may change before the testnet.

Devnet earns nothing. Mining on the public devnet gives no rewards and no airdrop weight, and Flop Labs said it "will not migrate any state from devnet to testnet". A home setup on devnet is practice for the testnet, now targeted for November 24, 2026 "subject to readiness" per Flop's timeline FAQ (our story). Flop never asks for your seed phrase.

Update, November 14, 2026: Hayes followed up on November 13 that Flop wants retail users to mine "with consumer graphics cards, Mac Mini's, etc." (post), and on November 14 that "you can use whatever hardware you want to mine", with income depending on "agentic demand for the models your hardware can run" (post). The current devnet miner manual still documents only a Docker-capable NVIDIA host, so the 16 GB floor and NVIDIA setup below remain the practical path today.

What is the minimum GPU to mine FLOP?

Flop's miner and validator economics FAQ says "the minimum miner spec is any GPU with at least 16GB of VRAM." It adds that "there is no whitelist of approved models" and that "a single card at or above the 16GB floor is a valid miner". The testnet page lists the same recommendation: a single GPU or a cluster with 16 GB+ VRAM per unit.

H100s aren't required. The FAQ calls the H100 80GB PCIe "the reference unit the model normalises to, not a floor."

Can an RTX 5090, 4090 or 5080 mine FLOP?

Each of these cards has at least 16 GB of VRAM, so each meets the published floor. The FAQ gives rough throughput relative to one H100 PCIe:

GPU	Throughput vs H100 PCIe (FAQ estimate)
RTX 5090	About 0.46
RTX 4090	About 0.36
RTX 5080	About 0.25
A100 80GB	About 0.48
V100 32GB	About 0.19
Mac Studio M3 Ultra	About 0.09
H100 SXM or H200	About 1.5
B200	About 3.5

These are reference factors for crediting delivered compute. The FAQ says per-card figures below the 80GB class "are used for capacity normalisation rather than published throughput." Our mining profitability page shows how they feed Flop's reward model.

How is a home GPU paid compared with an H100?

By the compute it delivers. The FAQ says "rewards are proportional to actual GFLOPS capacity delivered as a share of the network", and that consumer hardware "does not dilute enterprise hardware". Going by the table above, an RTX 4090 is credited at roughly a third of one H100 PCIe.

One caveat from the same FAQ: "The end-to-end settlement lane for non-TEE work is designed and not yet fully wired, so consumer-GPU mining is supported in specification while that path is still being completed." Consumer cards run the default SOFT tier, which needs no TEE.

The FAQ also warns that 16 GB "is the participation floor, not the specification behind the headline economics." Flop's headline numbers assume a model of about 117B parameters at 4-bit quantisation, which needs an 80GB-class card. A 16GB card serves smaller models instead, and "its economics are not a scaled-down copy of the H100 case." Power cost and resale value are yours to work out. Nobody has published FLOP earnings for any card yet. For the official calculator weights of every listed card, see best GPUs for FLOP mining.

What home build does Flop recommend?

The FAQ gives a recommended build for one or two RTX 5090s. It calls this "guidance, not a protocol requirement":

Part	One card	Two cards
Operating system	Linux first (Ubuntu 24.04, NVIDIA driver 570 or later), Windows to follow	Same
CPU	8 cores is enough for one card	16 cores (about 8 to 11 per card)
System RAM	64 GB	128 GB
Storage	2 TB NVMe	2 TB NVMe
Power supply	1200 W ATX 3.1	1600 W
Internet	At least 500 Mb/s down and 250 Mb/s up, under 100 ms latency	Same

No ECC memory and no TEE are needed. Two 5090s give 64 GB of VRAM, which the FAQ says is enough for mid-sized open-weight models in the 20B to 30B class. Two cards earn "roughly twice one card."

Can I mine FLOP on Windows?

Not with an official Windows guide yet. The FAQ's build guidance reads "Linux first ... Windows to follow", and Flop's miner manual targets a full NVIDIA VM or owned Linux host with Docker, Compose, the NVIDIA driver and Container Toolkit. Flop's agent skill for devnet miners names "a full Ubuntu 24.04 NVIDIA GPU VM or owned host, with at least 16 GB VRAM and 50 GiB model disk budget."

The Windows setup Hayes shared on November 8 is a community project that wraps Flop's miner images inside WSL2. Its repo says it isn't affiliated with Flop Labs. If you try it, read its scripts first and check that the images it pulls are Flop's own. Our news story covers what it claims.

What does a home connection need for the devnet miner?

The miner serves sessions over HTTPS on its own public name. The manual asks for "a public DNS name with ports 80 and 443 open to the host, or your own tunnel." On a home router that usually means port forwarding to the miner PC, or a tunnel. The worker also needs outbound access to the public RPC and mailbox.

The manual's host checklist also asks you to confirm the GPU shows up in nvidia-smi and in a Docker GPU test, and to keep enough disk for the exact model checkpoint with persistent volumes. Calibration measures every attached GPU "once, in aggregate", so adding a card later means calibrating again. The step-by-step commands are in our devnet miner guide.

Do I need an invitation to mine on devnet?

No. Flop's miner manual says that "from 2 November 2026 no invitation is needed". The sponsor approves a new devnet miner automatically while at most 100 automatically sponsored miners are still uncalibrated. Past that it answers 429, and you retry once one of them calibrates. The current caps are on our devnet limits page.

Paid sessions aren't open yet. The manual says sponsorship, registration and calibration work today through the public mailbox.

Is renting a cloud GPU a better first step?

It can be a cheaper way to test the setup. The FAQ says a cloud instance with a single 16 to 24 GB card, such as an NVIDIA L4, "is enough to prove the setup end to end on devnet". It calls that "a way to validate the configuration rather than the economics." Our miner setup guide covers the rental providers the manual documents.

Does home mining count for the FLOP airdrop?

Only on the testnet. Flop's timeline FAQ says a miner's "share of the miner airdrop equals its share of verified compute delivered across the testnet." The same rules apply "for a single consumer card and for a fund bringing a thousand machines". Devnet work doesn't count. See our FLOP airdrop guide and testnet status page for what is known so far.

FAQ

Can I mine FLOP with a gaming PC?

Yes, if its GPU has at least 16 GB of VRAM. Flop's economics FAQ says any GPU meeting that floor can mine and is credited on the compute it delivers. Flop's setup guides are Linux first, with Windows support still to come.

What is the minimum GPU for FLOP mining?

Any GPU with at least 16 GB of VRAM, according to Flop's miner and validator economics FAQ. There is no whitelist of approved models, and a single card is a valid miner.

Can an RTX 4090 mine FLOP?

Yes. The RTX 4090 has 24 GB of VRAM, above the 16 GB floor. Flop's FAQ puts its throughput at about 0.36 of one H100 PCIe, and rewards follow delivered compute.

Can an RTX 5080 mine FLOP?

Yes. The RTX 5080 has 16 GB of VRAM, which meets the floor. Flop's FAQ puts it at about 0.25 of one H100 PCIe. A community member ran a devnet miner on one in November 2026, using an unofficial Windows wrapper.

Is there an official Windows FLOP miner?

Not yet. Flop's FAQ says Linux first with Windows to follow, and the miner manual targets an Ubuntu NVIDIA host with Docker. Windows wrappers shared on X are community projects.

Can I mine FLOP on a Mac mini?

Hayes said on November 13, 2026 that Flop wants retail users mining with consumer graphics cards and Mac Minis. Flop's revenue model gives a Mac mini M4 Pro a starting weight of 0.001 of an H100 SXM, a rough planning estimate, and the economics FAQ puts a Mac Studio M3 Ultra at about 0.09 of an H100 PCIe. The current devnet miner manual only documents a Docker-capable NVIDIA host, so there is no published Mac setup yet.

Does mining FLOP at home earn the airdrop now?

No. Only verified compute on the testnet counts toward the miner airdrop, and the testnet is targeted to start on November 24, 2026 (tentative). The devnet earns no rewards, and Flop Labs said no devnet state carries over to testnet.