Gigabyte GA-H110-D3A 6x PCI-E GPU Mining Motherboard

8 Sep
2017

The chances are not many of you have heard about the Gigabyte GA-H110-D3A motherboard that is intended for 6x GPU mining rigs and the reason for that is probably the fact that Gigabyte hasn’t been promoting this product much as a mining motherboard. Gigabyte is a bit late on the GPU mining front with a motherboard designed for mining rigs with the GA-H110-D3A, even though the motherboard comes with up to date specs. That however does not mean that the company hasn’t been offering other higher-end products that are good to go for use for crypto mining, there are quite a few of these already and we have been using some of the models ourselves. The GA-H110-D3A however is still new for us and we are going to be giving it a try and sharing our experience with the motherboard pretty soon anyway.

The key thing about the Gigabyte GA-H110-D3A is that it comes at an attractive price and has all the features you need in order to build a regular GPU mining rig with 6x video cards. It is a basic motherboard with 6x PCI-E slots (single x16 and five x1 slots) that needs to be durable and reliable and be cost effective, so no shiny extras that you won’t be needing anyway for mining. The motherboard comes with a M.2 slot allowing you to use SSD in that format and save some extra space and cabling, especially power cables as they may be a problem in some situations. There are also a couple of things to make the product more attractive marketing wise, though you probably won’t benefit much from them such as USB 3.1 Gen1 support, high quality onboard audio design or a Realtek Gigabit LAN with cFosSpeed internet accelerator software. Some of the extra features might be actually helpful however such as Humidity Protection Glass Fabric PCB, High ESD Ethernet & USB Port Protection or High Temperature Protection Lower RDS(on) MOSFETs Design as often mining rigs are not working in the best possible conditions.

Gigabyte has an interesting microsite for mining that is centered on the H110-D3A motherboard, but also has some more useful information for other of the company’s products that can be used for mining. The most interesting part is probably the table listing 12 different Gigabyte motherboards with information on what BIOS version to use for mining and how many GPUs can be used on the specific model. Do note that there are some motherboards that do require the use of additional M.2 to PCI-E adapter in order to reach the listed number of GPUs. For example the Z170-Gaming K3 is one of the board that we have used a lot for 6x GPU mining that did not have support for more than six video cards up until BIOS F22, but now Gigabyte seems to be saying that it will work with F23a using an additional M.2 to PCI-E adapter (something we need to test). There are even some motherboards for up to 9x GPUs with dual M.2 adapters like the Z170X-Gaming 5 and Z170X-Gaming 6, though you might actually have a problem using all 9 under Windows for example.

– Here is the Gigabyte microsite with some information and tips regarding mining motherboards…

New White PCI-E Extenders With Multiple Power Connectors

8 Sep
2017

It seems that there is now a new model of PCI Express extenders for connecting GPUs to mining motherboards available in white color PCBs and with three different power connectors available. The new extenders come equipped with a SATA power, 4-pin Molex power and 6-pin PCI-E power connectors and you can apparently are able to connect power through any or on all of them. This would allow for better flexibility, especially in cases where you do not have enough power connectors of a certain type, but can also help in overcoming issues with too much power draw over a single power cable. Normally the SATA power is the lowest rated in terms of power capability and thus it is most often the cause of possible issues with burnt or melted cables with GPUs that draw more power from the PCI-E slot. Connecting a Molex to SATA power along with the SATA power onboard on these extenders could help in preventing such problems for example.

Regardless of the power connector options available on these and how you mix and match them you should still be careful how much power is being drawn over a single physical cable going to the power supply. More than two PCI-E extenders on a single physical cable is not recommended, though it also depends what is the power draw of the GPUs as some may have very little or even no power draw from the PCI-E slot, while others may have huge draw even if the GPUs are not with very high TDP. Even if the power cables themselves (18 AWG or even 16 AWG) are capable of handling the higher load the modular power connectors that connect the cables to the power supply are often the failure points as they are really not rated for that much power. So always be careful if your mining GPU rigs in order to avoid any possible hardware failures that can result in extended downtime to diagnose and/or fix afterwards.

New Eminer ETHASH miner v0.6.0-RC1 With Web Dashboard

7 Sep
2017

There is a new closed source Ethereum (ETH) miner that also works with other Ethash-based crypto coins available and it is called Eminer. The miner is available for both AMD and Nvidia GPUs and what makes it really interesting is the integrated local web dashboard that gives you detailed stats for the mining rig the miner is running on. The new Eminer ethash miner v0.6.0-RC1 is written in the Go language and provides performance comparable to that of other top miners for AMD at least with possibly slightly slower hashrate on Nvidia. Eminer comes with support for Stratum and RPC clients with failover, as well as with support for NiceHash stratum implementation. There is however a 1% devfee included in this miner software, so have that in mind should you decide to give it a try. The Windows version comes with Asynchronous multiworker mode that searched shares with multiple instances and this can supposedly bring increased by 1% ~ 2% share luck. Binaries for Linux and Mac OS X of the miner are also available.

The real gem here is the web-based interface that gives you an overview of the mining hardware and the current mining process, including a graphical representation of the hashrate over time. YOu get information on the available AMD or Nvidia GPUs and their current status such as clocks, hashrate, temperature and fan speed. This allows for quick and easy overview over web of multiple mining rigs without having to spend time decoding the console output from the miner… that one can use some improvements to be more useful, but probably the focus was placed more on the web-based dashboard. Still this new miner looks promising and useful and it never hurts to have some competition among the crypto mining software.

Since it is a closed software with no source available posted by a new user on Bitcointalk some people might have some concerns you can check a VirusTotal scan of the executable here. Not a guarantee that there are no warnings since it is a new miner that is not based on other existing codebase that gets detected as potential threat by some antivirus software.

– For more details about the new Eminer Ethash miner v0.6.0-RC1…

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