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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.
AMD’s new Radeon RX VEGA 64 GPU is now officially out in the wild and we have some first impressions from it to share regarding crypto mining. There were various pieces of information and rumors regarding the mining performance of the new AMD VEGA, but since we got out hands on one we are going to share what are the actual out of the box results that we got from it. The new HBM2 memory used in the AMD VEGA GPUs is probably the most interesting part in the new product line, but unfortunately out of the box it does not do great in memory intensive algorithms. Of course we all know from AMD’s Polaris range that with some tweaks and modifications extra performance will most likely be available to miners, but that could take some time.
Probably the most important performance that people what to know about is the hashrate for mining Ethereum (ETH) and other crypto coins based on the Ethash algorithm. Unfortunately the out of the box performance from Radeon RX VEGA 64 using the latest Claymore Dual Eth miner that comes with official support for Vega is just around 31-32 MHS. We’ve seen claims of much higher performance being theoretically possible, but we are yet to confirm if it is and if these claims are actually real or just speculation. The not so great thing is that this hashrate is achieved with pretty high power consumption and the higher the temperature of the GPU goes, the lower the performance drops and it is really easy for the air cooler VEGA 64 to get hot.
Here is the situation with Zcash (ZEC) mining using the new Radeon RX VEGA 64 GPU from AMD, just about 475-480 H/s. The not so great performance in these two more memory intensive algorithms, even with HBM2 memory is not what is the most concerning thing however. What we are more concerned with AMD’s new Radeon RX VEGA 64 GPUs is the fact that they are power hungry GPUs and quickly get hot, so cooling them properly for 24/7 mining might be a bit of a challenge, at least for the air cooled model. The amount of power used does not justify the level of performance we get for mining out of the box at this point…
You can say that the new Radeon RX VEGA 64 GPU out of the box at stock settings does manage to perform very similar in terms of performance to what a well overclocked Nvidia GTX 1070 can also deliver for ETH and ZEC mining. The AMD GPU however does it with significantly more power used when compared to what the Nvidia card requires to provide very similar performance for mining (double the power for the VEGA). As far as gaming goes, the Radeon RX VEGA 64 is apparently closer to GTX 1080 in terms of performance, but then again it still consumes more power than the Nvidia card.
What remains to be seen is what the initial availability is going to be and what the actual pricing of the new VEGA GPUs will be considering the fact that the demand from miners might not be that high, though you never know… with market prices of Polaris GPUs at the level they are available now the official recommended price of the VEGA 64 does seem unreasonably low, so expect higher initial prices for sure. On the other hand the Radeon RX VEGA 64 could also do better in more GPU intensive algorithms than it is doing for memory intensive ones. The option for dual mining with one memory-intensive and one GPU-intensive algorithm may also turn out to be pretty attractive alternative, even wiht the not so great performance in memory-intensive mining algorithms alone.
- In: Mining Hardware|Tests and Reviews
- Tags: AMD, AMD Radeon RX VEGA 64, AMD Vega, Radeon RX VEGA 64, Radeon RX VEGA 64 Equihash, Radeon RX VEGA 64 ETH, Radeon RX VEGA 64 Ethash, Radeon RX VEGA 64 Ethereum, Radeon RX VEGA 64 hashrate, Radeon RX VEGA 64 mining, Radeon RX VEGA 64 mining performance, Radeon RX VEGA 64 Zcash, Radeon RX VEGA 64 ZEC, RX VEGA 64, VEGA 64
We were feeling a bit nostalgic for the old times where a new altcoin with a fresh algorithm and a new miner will launch and we would just go and mine it. Signatum (SIGT) has just offered what we needed to feel nostalgia over the old mining times no more. It is a new coin with no premine, ICO, dev fee or any of these and it comes with a new algorithm and thus new miners to support it. It is a POW/POS coin, though POS with 5% annual will start after block 98500 and POW mining will end at block 100000. The initial block reward is 2500 SIGT, down to half after block 3000 then halving again after block 60000. The total PoW coins that will be mined are 137,500,000 with block time of 2 minutes, after that POS is 5% annual on staked coins. There are no big promises being made for big and bright future with this one, though there is a lot of user interest already and a lot of miners are jumping on board, so who knows…
There is a CPU miner available, though with the release of AMD GPU miner (forked sgminer) and Nvidia GPU miner (forked ccminer) there is not much point mining with CPU anymore. SIGT is already being traded on Cryptopia with more exchanges probably following soon with the user interest apparently growing for this new altcoin, so you might want to check it out and give it a try mining if you have some spare GPU power available. Even Mining Rig Rentals has added support for selling and buying SkunkHash-Raptor hashrate.
Signatum Mining Pools:
– https://sigt.suprnova.cc/
– https://pool.mn/sigt/
– http://lpool.name/
– https://onepool.online/
– http://hashbag.cc
– http://yiimp.ccminer.org
– https://pool.coin-miners.info
– https://aikapool.com/sigt
– http://zpool.ca/
– You can check the SIGT announcement thread over at Bitcointalk for more details…