Asus recently took the wraps off of a monster ATX form factor motherboard aimed squarely at crypto currency miners. The aptly named Asus B250 Expert Mining motherboard is based on Intel's B250 chipset and features an impressive 19 PCI-E slots! The board is based around Intel's budget chipset and is paired with an LGA 1151 socket for Intel Skylake or Kaby Lake CPUs. There are also two DDR4 memory slots and four SATA 6 Gbps ports.
The B250 Expert Mining motherboard is powered by a single 8-pin CPU power connector driving a 6-phase DIGI+ VRM, three (!) 24-pin ATX12V connectors, and three Molex power connectors. The top 24-pin drives the first seven PCI-E slots (including the single PCI-E x16 slot) while the other two 24-pin connectors are responsible for powering 6 of the remaining PCI-E x1 slots each.
Asus claims that the upcoming motherboard has several mining focused features including a tuned BIOS tweaked to improve mining efficiency, a splash screen at startup that shows the state of each PCI-E slot at-a-glance at each boot (Asus Mining Expert software) as well as voltage stabilization capacitors for each GPU slot.
With this motherboard miners will be able to hook up to 19 graphics cards to each motherboard which reduces the number of complete systems they need to build and maintain improving ROI time, increasing power efficiency, and reducing maintenance costs. At the time of writing there is a bit of hiccup with this plan though as miners will not be able to fully take advantage of all 19 slots for graphics cards. First off, miners will have to use Linux and even then they will be limited to a maximum of eight graphics cards from AMD and eight graphics cards from NVIDIA (if they can even get that working reliably…). Not all hope for an uber mining motherboard is lost though as Anandtech reports that AMD is working on a driver update slated for release later this year that will enable miners to use all 19 slots for their graphics cards.
Asus has not yet released pricing, but I would expect it to come at a hefty premium considering it offers the highest number of PCI-E slots on a standard motherboard so far. Asus has reportedly already begun sampling the B250 Expert Mining board to partners and it should be available at retail soon.
Even if you are not into the crypto currency mining scene, it is intriguing seeing the response to miners from the hardware manufacturers with new focused product lines.
Also read:
- Let's Talk About Mining – Cryptocurrency Revisited
- Donate to the PC Perspective Mining Pool! A NiceHash How-to
- A Quick Look at the SAPPHIRE Radeon RX 470 Mining Edition
- NVIDIA Partners Launching Mining Focused P106-100 and P104-100 Graphics Cards
- Mining specific cards are real – ASUS and Sapphire GP106 and RX 470 show up
Though mining is not my
Though mining is not my forte, bur GPU rendering is.. Using Blender with potential 19 GPU’s .. heck 18 GPU’s and a 10GB nic would be quite interesting.
However that 1x PICe bandwidth would be a hamper on the initial frame that is to be rendered. uploading 8GB at thee speeds would take 10th of seconds
Either way, I wish they would release a Ryzen version so I could pare this board up with a highly treaded CPU, rendering would love all these resources.
Or instead of a full blow
Or instead of a full blow Ryzen, then some Ryzen APU 🙂
Intel is still lagging behind AMD in this department
For the first time in memory,
For the first time in memory, Best Buy has been sold out of GPUs for the last month or so. Miners have gone bonkers….
Well with Vega selling far
Well with Vega selling far above its MSRP/SEP Nvidia needs to raise its GPU’s MSRP/SEP because that GDDR5X/6 is getting more costly also like HBM2’s pricing. And JHH over at Nvidia is going to have to Raise those GTX prices at least $100 or more so Nvidia’s pricing can be a little above AMD’s prices, because the Nvidia fans will always pay more and brag about paying more. So look for some MSRP/SEP price increases coming soon for that HIGH-Nvidia-Price(TM) advantage to stop AMD’s winning on that higher GPU price race also, and Nvidia fans would not have it any other way.
We can not have AMD winning on that higher selling price metric because AMD winning any metric gets Nvidia’s fanboy’s so buthurt. So fix that ASAP JHH, your Nvidia fanboy’s are in great angst, what with AMD’s Vega GPUs selling for so much money over Nvidia’s GPU SKUs.
Wow.. Troll much?
Wow.. Troll much?
Can i use of this for
Can i use of this for videowall ( Splitting screen to 12 or 18 and see a picture on 18 large LED monitor ) in windows? PLS give me some Info
No. Video cards doing video
No. Video cards doing video need a full 16x PCI-E slot for the sheer volume of data shunting through the card. This board has only 1x PCE-E slots which are all that’s needed for mining data.