With the price of bitcoin setting new record highs on a daily basis, most recently hitting $4200,
which made it three-times more valuable than gold - it would seem that
motherboard manufacturers have joined graphics cards OEMs in trying to
capitalize on the so-called gold rush. Companies like ASROCK and Biostar released motherboards
that specifically support a high number of graphics cards since the
process of mining requires an ever-increasing amount of processing
power. ASUS has joined the fray with its new B250 Mining Expert
motherboard, which supports a record 19 graphics cards through
individual PCI-e 3.0 x1 slots. Unsurprisingly, this introduced several
stability issues, since the power draw would reportedly cause the system
to crash. So to remedy this, the company grouped these slots into three
separate divisions, with each receiving its own dedicated ATX12V 24-pin
power connector.
Currently, the system can only support up to 16 - eight AMD
and eight NVIDIA cards - at once, with a planned driver update
reportedly pushing this to the full 19, once it rolls out shortly after
launch. It still beats out all its competitors in its current state,
since it's the first motherboard that supports this many cards for
mining.
The process of utilizing the board to connect this many
cards requires you to install PCI-e 3.0 x16 risers that connect to each
individual card and each particular slot. This allows the system to send
and receive the basic computational data during the process of mining,
without taking up the space a standard PCI-e 3.0 x16 slot would demand,
allowing miners to increase their hashing power at the lowest possible
initial investment.
Beyond that, the board supports Intel's 6th and 7th
generation processors, 32GB DDR4 RAM, and comes with one PCI-e 3.0 x16
(standard GPU) slot. Other features include support for four SATA III
storage drives - although mining systems rarely require this many - and
six USB ports. According to ASUS, the board will retail for
approximately $130 in the US, which makes it cheaper and more capable
than its closest competitors. It is expected to launch later this year.
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