PinIdea 17GHS X11 ASIC Miner DR-100

27 Aug
2017

PinIdea has updated their product range with a new 17GHS X11 ASIC miner named DR-100 in order to be able to cope up with the increased competition from Bitmain and Innosilicon with their recently announced new X11 miners offering significant X11 hashrate boost. PinIdea seems to be planning to start shipping their new X11 ASIC miner in September with first-come first-served principle. Currently the miner is already out of stock due to the big demand apparently (or limited number of units), even with the price of a single unit close to almost 3 BTC.

PinIdea DR-100 X11 ASIC specifications:
– HashRate: 17000 MHS (+-5%)
– Power: 820W (wall power +-5%)
– Dimensions: 28cm x 18cm(h) x 15cm(w)
– Weight: 5KG
– Interface: Lan (100m/1000m)
– Fan: 2x 14038 Double ball fan (55DB)
– Operating Temperature: 0C~40C
– Mining Software: Custom CGminer

– For more information about the PinIdea 17GHS X11 ASIC Miner DR-100…

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.

Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition Beta for Blockchain Compute Released

16 Aug
2017

AMD has released a new beta video driver “for Blockchain Compute” or with other words a driver intended for mining and not for gaming use. The Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition Beta for Blockchain Compute Driver Version 17.30.1029 (Windows Driver Store Version 22.19.659.0) is available for Windows 7 and Windows 10 in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The driver supports AMD Radeon HD 7×00 GPUs all the way up to the latest Radeon RX Vega Series Graphics. There are no official details available on what are the optimizations and if you should expect any kind of performance improvement. In fact this is more like a driver fixing the DAG epoch issues for Ethereum mining and it does not seem to be bringing any specific hashrate improvement other than restoring performance for Ethereum miners on Polaris GPUs. There was an unofficial fix a couple of days ago, but now you can use this official beta driver with the same results as the previous unofficial solution.

– For more details about the beta driver for Blockchain Compute fixing the DAG epoch issue…

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