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Motherboard Maker Biostar To Launch Bitcoin ASIC Devices Soon

18, Mar 2014

biostar-btc-24gh-bitcoin-asic

The motherboard maker Biostar is apparently going to be launching soon a dedicated crypto mining motherboard or as the call it a “Professional Bitcoin Mining Machine”. The product called Biostar BTC-24GH will use 64 ASIC chips on a single board that supposedly will provide 24 GH/s hashrate for mining Bitcoins (SHA-256). There is no word about release date or pricing available, but this offer already seems like a too little, too late thing with other ASIC makers going for the Terahash range already and the newtwork difficulty already way too high for just 24 GH/s to be profitable, unless it is very power efficient and very cheap, both of which do not seem very likely and you’ll now in a moment why.

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The specifications of the 24 GH/s SHA-256 ASIC device say 130W as power consumption per module and you can stack up modules, up to 50 together for higher hashrate. Each module will be with dimensions of 244×244 millimeters and use COM to USB connection to the computer. With 50 of these boards you could get up to 1.2 TH/s hashrate which does not sound bad at all, if the price is right, however you would need 6500W of power so in terms of performance per watt the Biostar BTC-24GH won’t be interesting at all. As we’ve already said: too little, too late .

– For more information about the Biostar BTC-24GH Bitcoin mining ASIC devices…

Asus B250 Mining Expert Motherboard with 19 PCI-E Slots

20, Aug 2017

It seems that the race for a mining motherboard with the most PCI Express slots is far from over with the AsRock H110 Pro BTC+ and Biostar TB250-BTC PRO probably being only the start. Asus is planning on joining the party with not just 12 or 13 PCI-E slots, but with 19, though you might be limited to actually using only 16 of them. We already know that you are limited up to 8 GPUs from a kind (AMD or Nvidia) under Windows, so 16 max if you mix them. With Linux though more GPUs from a kind that what Windows allows are usable, but then again more than 16 at this point might not be possible. This is probably why Asus are talking about this product as supporting 16 GPUs even though it does come with 19 slots…

For now Asus is just teasing us with this motherboard and there are no full details about it, including info on pricing and availability. Still it shows that the company has interest in the mining market, especially after also releasing mining oriented GPUs. Unlike some other manufacturers however Asus is showing that they are designing their mining products with miners in mind and not just pushing something that is not worth buying like some others. Their Asus B250 Mining Expert mining motherboard comes with three 24-pin ATX power connectors for directly connecting up to three power supplies without the need to use external means to synchronize the PSUs. There are also three 4-pin Molex power connectors on board for powering GPUs, though you probably will use powered risers and won’t be needing these.

We are yet to see more information emerging, but things are definitely looking interesting already. What you need to be prepared with motherboards for mining supporting so many GPUs is that there will be some unexpected challenges when building the mining rig. Cable lengths, connector spacing, enough space for proper cooling and so on. Design challenges emerge and the more video cards you use, the harder it gets to make things work as expected. Though once you clear the design for let us say 16 GPUs, then the next mining rig should be much easier and problem free to assemble… hopefully.

We Got Our Hands on an AsRock H110 Pro BTC+ 13x GPU Mining Moitherboard

3, Jul 2017

Thanks to AsRock we already have a sample of their new H110 Pro BTC+ crypto mining motherboard with 13 PCI-E slots for testing, so you can expect a review soon. The motherboard should start appearing on the market sometime later this month, so it is not yet available in the retail channel. It is a really interesting design and definitely something that AsRock had to do in order to “show muscle” after the competition in the crypto mining motherboard space started to heat up with shortages of the hugely popular AsRock H81 Pro BTC and other brands like Biostar announcing multiple new mining motherboards.

The AsRock H110 Pro BTC+ motherboard is pretty interesting with the 13 PCI Express slots available for use with video cards with the help of PCI-E extenders, but this also comes with some challenges. Initially we got information that the motherboard should work out of the box with 13 GPUs under Windows and Linux, and although that might be true indeed there seem to be some limitations. It seems that the 8x GPU limit is still a problem, however you should be able to run 8x AMD with 5x NVIDIA GPUs under Windows, but not all 13 from the same type out of the box (it could still be possible to overcome this limitation). For Linux users 13x GPUs do not seem to be a problem or at least thirteen ADM GPUs with the ethOS mining distribution.

Building a 13x GPU crypto mining rig could also bring some other challenges including problems with the power supply or to be more precise power supplies now that there are shortages and it is hard to source higher power models. Of course it depends on the type of video cards that you are using for your mining rig, but in general the new H110 Pro BTC+ crypto mining motherboard from AsRock seems to be more useful for builds that have mid-range GPUs and not high-end ones. Builds such as 13x AMD Radeon RX 470/480 or RX 570/580 that use single PCI-E power connector or Nvidia GTX 1060/1070 again with a single PCI-E power connector (sub-200W power usage) seem more reasonable.

Imagine what a challenge it will be if you want to build a mining rig with 13x Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti GPUs. At 250W for 100% TDP per card you are looking at 3250W of power required just for the video cards, there are simply not much options for dual PSU setups that can handle that, so it is more at least a three power supplies setup. In this configuration it is not just the power requirements, but also the number of PCI-E power connectors that you would need for the video cards. You would need 13x 8-pin PCI-E power connectors and 13x 6-pin PCI-E power connectors, then also 13x 4-pin Molex connectors for the PCI-E extenders. You also need to be careful not to overload any of the power lines of the power supplies by connecting too much components on to a single cable.

– You can check the official AsRock H110 Pro BTC+ product page for more details…


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