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It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
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The peak of interest in crypto mining in the last months has apparently sparkled the need for some interesting new products designed to help the users of mining rigs get things done in a better and more efficient way. As a result we are seeing enthusiast designed things like a power distributor board allowing the users to connect up to 4 power supplies that can be used to work together powering a single mining rig. Of course you can always go for a 2x PSU boards such as the Add2PSU, but what if you need to connect three or four power supplies? With Add2PSU you can use a number of devices to connect more power supplies together, but this will take up more molex connectors on the main power supply. Going for an optimized board that can use up to 4x power supplies together with a single molex from the main PSU is more convenient, especially if going for a 8x GPU mining rig with more powerful video cards that take up two PCI-Express power connectors.
Another commonly needed thing for multi GPU mining rigs is an easy way to connect multiple cooling fans to go along with the video cards by helping them get cooler air and eliminate the forming of hot air pockets around the GPUs. So getting an easy way to connect multiple fans, up to 6 for example via a single board powered by a 4-pin Molex power connector makes things much more simple and user friendly. Adding an easy way to select the operating voltages of the fans via jumpers and getting them to work at either 5V, 7V or 12V without the need of additional electronics is more than welcome. Of course you need not only to get good and useful functionality from a fan distributor board, but also make it affordable as with crypto mining extra costs are always considered.
While enthusiast designed products like up to 4x power distributor boards for multiple power supplies for a single computer or fan distributor boards with 6x fans and voltage control option may be interesting for regular users, however the real market for devices like these has opened with the boom of GPU mining rigs. The two boards that we are showing you here are just an example, there are other interesting products getting designed by enthusiasts for the crypto mining market as well. An interesting example of other such products is the SimpleMining SimpleRigResetter that allows for easy power cycling of multiple GPU mining rigs if they have an issue and hang up.
According to the data from the website CoinMarketCap that tracks all of the more serious crypto currencies the total market capitalization has just passed the $100 Billion USD mark. Furthermore in less than three months it has risen multiple times from just about $25 Billion to today’s peak of a little over $101 Billion USD with Bitcoin surging shortly to a little over $2900 USD, before getting back down to the $2700 USD range. Many are wondering already when the bubble will burst or if it will at all, as other people are considering Bitcoin and some of the altcoins still being greatly undervalued. For now the craze continues, even with the shortages of GPUs and other mining hardware on the market.
It is interesting to note that Bitcoin (BTC) is responsible for just about the half of the total market cap of crypto currencies, if we take BTC from the equation and look only at all altcoins the number falls down to abut $53 Billion. In the last three months Bitcoin has significantly reduced its dominance in the market cap from over 80% to less than 50% currently. The most significant altcoins gaining in the total market cap at the expense of BTC are Ethereum and Ripple. Although we’ve seen some positive movement with Litecoin, Dash, Monero and some others as well, they are still much smaller compared to the market cap of the top three crypto coins in terms of market cap.
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.