Archive for the ‘Mining Hardware’ Category

Using a PCI-Express x1 to 3x PCIe x1 Slots Splitter

4, Jun 2017

Miners willing to increase the number of available PCI-Express slots on their motherboards and thus get a better density with more GPUs on their mining rigs are always looking for different options. One of these options is the use of the cheap Chinese PCI-Express x1 to 3x PCIe x1 slots splitter boards that can be found relatively cheap if purchased directly from China. These boards take up one PCI-E slot on your motherboard and provide you with three x1 slots to use, so essentially they are adding up two extra slots for you to try and populate with video cards.

Now, you should be aware of the limitations of these boards. First off they do not seem to work with Nvidia GPUs, only with AMD video cards, so have that in mind depending on the mining rigs you are building. The fact that these boards add two more PCI-E slots physically does not mean that you will be able to fill them with video cards and they will all work. You may need to try multiple slots on your motherboard when plugging the splitter board as not all slots may work properly with it. We’ve seen some motherboards work with no additional cards using such a splitter board, on some only one extra card is working and on others both extra cards will function.

It is best to try what works on a particular motherboard first and then decide if you are Ok with the results you are getting. Going for a motherboard with 6 PCI-E slots to be able to install 8 video cards with the help of such PCIe splitter is a nice thing, but then again not all motherboards will work with 8 GPUs this way. Some people are suing such boards to upgrade motherboards with just 4x PCI-E slots to six in order to go for a “standard” 6x GPU mining rig. Again, there is no guarantee that the motherboard will work properly with these splitter boards and add extra two PCI-E slots, even if you are able to get the extra slots the motherboard might still have trouble working properly with more than 4 GPUs. In general we are not big fans of solutions like these as they may have varying results, but sometimes a thing like these boards can help you overcome some limitations nevertheless.

Quick Look at the ASUS GeForce GTX 1060 OC 6GB 9Gbps

1, Jun 2017

Back in March when Nvidia introduced the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti it has also announced two upgrades – the GeForce GTX 1060 with 9 Gbps and GeForce GTX 1080 with 11 Gbps memory. These two new models with faster video memory did not get a lot of attention and they have just recently started becoming available on the market. The GTX 1060 with 9 instead of 8 GHz GDDR5 video memory is what caught our attention and more specifically the ASUS GeForce GTX 1060 OC 6GB 9Gbps and we took one for a quick spin to see its crypto mining performance.

The faster GDDR5 memory from Samsung found in this model is what makes the GPU pretty interesting for the currently quite popular and profitable Equihash and Ethash crypto algorithms. We wanted to see the mining performance with ETH and ZEC, even though the memory bus on the GTX 1060 is just 192-bit and that is a bit of a limiting factor. The big question here is how this GTX 1060 model compares to GTX 1070 that uses slower GDDR5 memory clocked at 8GHz (like the regular GTX 1060), but with 256-bit bus and comes with significantly higher number of CUDA cores.

Going for the Ethereum (ETH) mining performance with the latest Claymore ETH miner we are not that happy with the performance we see – just about 17 MHS at stock settings. We kind of expected the lower result due to the 192-bit memory bus, but had hoped that the hgiher clocked GDDR5 memory could help for a bit better results. The GTX 1070 does about 25 MHS at stock settings, but can be pushed to about 30 MHs with some memory clock. Overclocking the GTX 1060 9Gbps helps a bit, but still that can push the performance to just about 19 MHs, so not that much better.

The situation with ZCash (ZEC) is a bit better with about 300 Sol/s at stock settings using the EWBF ZEC miner for the GTX 1060 9Gbps while the GTX 1070 does of course much more at over 400 and can go up to about 450-460 with some extra tweaking. It seems that the faster 9Gbps memory on the GTX 1060 does not do it that much good for mining, tough it might be more usable for gaming. With prices for the GTX 1060 9Gbps not that much lower than the price of GTX 1070 there is actually not that much reason to go for it the faster memory instead of the faster GPU in general.

Now, if Nvidia does tweak up the GTX 1070 with the faster 9 Gbps GDDR5 video memory things might get more interesting, especially for Ethereum mining using these, because of the the problems that AMD is having with Radeon RX series availability. At the moment Ethereum mining on a decently clocked in terms of video memory GTX 1070 can bring it to about 30 MHS with 600+ MHz on the RAM and with reduced TDP. So power/performance wise the next best thing as an alternative to an AMD Radeon RX 570/RX 580 with a good video memory that can get to about 28-29 MHS after modding is in fact a GTX 1070. There are already rumors that AMD may have a couple of months with stock shortages for the RX series of GPUs, so we might soon start seeing the demand for the more interesting for mining Nvidia GPUs increasing.

AsRock H110 Pro BTC+ Mining Motherboard with 13 PCI-E Slots

31, May 2017

If you thought AsRock is getting behind in the game lately as far as GPU crypto mining motherboards go, well thing again… even though they haven’t had a new Pro BTC motherboard since the H81 Pro BTC they are not sleeping apparently and the recent shortages of that particular and popular model. At Computex 2017 the company has showcased an upcoming product that has caught the attention of the mining community, a motherboard with 13 PCI-Express slots for up to 13 video cards, connected via PCI-E extenders of course as the slots are pretty tightly fitted on the motherboard to retain a standard size.

The new motherboard is called Asrock H110 Pro BTC+ and is soon-to-be-launched (no exact launch date given yet)… it even has an M.2 slot onboard, though 14th card via M.2 to PCIe might be a bit too much to expect to work, but who knows. Other than the new chipset and the staggering 13 PCIe slots, the new motherboard seems to follow the design of the previous generation of Pro BTC boards, simplistic and cost effective. Of course the H110 chipset means that you would need to go to the newer Socket 1151 CPUs such as the Intel G3900 series of processors as well as the newer DDR4 memory.

We’ll probably have to wait a bit more for additional details such as the full specifications, pricing as well as release date and availability. You can expect the demand to be pretty high though, even considering that the demonstrated solution during Computex in Taipei, Taiwan apparently used Windows and had only 8 GPUs running (based on the available information), but all 13 should be available for use when the new motherboard hits the market hopefully soon (not yet sure if they will work under Windows though).


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