AsRock H110 Pro BTC+ Mining Motherboard with 13 PCI-E Slots

31 May
2017

If you thought AsRock is getting behind in the game lately as far as GPU crypto mining motherboards go, well thing again… even though they haven’t had a new Pro BTC motherboard since the H81 Pro BTC they are not sleeping apparently and the recent shortages of that particular and popular model. At Computex 2017 the company has showcased an upcoming product that has caught the attention of the mining community, a motherboard with 13 PCI-Express slots for up to 13 video cards, connected via PCI-E extenders of course as the slots are pretty tightly fitted on the motherboard to retain a standard size.

The new motherboard is called Asrock H110 Pro BTC+ and is soon-to-be-launched (no exact launch date given yet)… it even has an M.2 slot onboard, though 14th card via M.2 to PCIe might be a bit too much to expect to work, but who knows. Other than the new chipset and the staggering 13 PCIe slots, the new motherboard seems to follow the design of the previous generation of Pro BTC boards, simplistic and cost effective. Of course the H110 chipset means that you would need to go to the newer Socket 1151 CPUs such as the Intel G3900 series of processors as well as the newer DDR4 memory.

We’ll probably have to wait a bit more for additional details such as the full specifications, pricing as well as release date and availability. You can expect the demand to be pretty high though, even considering that the demonstrated solution during Computex in Taipei, Taiwan apparently used Windows and had only 8 GPUs running (based on the available information), but all 13 should be available for use when the new motherboard hits the market hopefully soon (not yet sure if they will work under Windows though).

Brave’s Basic Attention Token (BAT) Sale Starts Tomorrow

30 May
2017

We have already covered the new – Brave browser and the ideas that the people behind the project have about integrating Bitcoin payments. The Brave Browser’s Brave Payments allow users to replace website ads with a kind of regular donations supporting their favorite websites, but the project wants to take things even further with their upcoming token sale. Brave’s BAT or Basic Attention Token the sale of which is about to start tomorrow is going to extend things a bit further in the new way that online ads will function.

The idea of the Basic Attention Token is to radically improve the efficiency of digital advertising by creating a new token that can be exchanged between publishers, advertisers and users. The token will be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on the Brave platform. The utility of the token is based on user attention, which simply means a person’s focused mental engagement and it will all happens on the Ethereum blockchain at the BAT is an ERC20 token built on top of Ethereum.

The goals of the whole Brave ecosystem including the BAT are to not compromise on privacy, but at the same time help advertisers get better results and users to bothered by ads if they don’t want to, but if they do their attention for actually seeing the ads will be rewarded with BAT tokens as well. So in theory every one will win – the advertiser, the publisher and the user. The idea is really good and will hopefully help in providing a real alternative for the users of the Brave browser as well as for publishers and advertisers that really want better results and alternatives besides the big players in the online advertising game that control most of the market.

We are really interested in the Basic Attention Token as well as the whole Brave project and have been keeping track on how things develop, even if we are not big fans on token sales in general, there are still some projects that we like so much and want to support and this is one of those. Our advice to you is to check out the Brave browser if you still haven’t tried it, it is not only available for computers, but for mobile devices and also keep an eye out on the BAT sale starting tomorrow.

– To get more details about Brave’s Basic Attention Token (BAT) and the token sale…

Shortage of AMD Radeon RX 500 Series of GPUs on the Market

28 May
2017

With the switch from the RX 400 to the new RX 500 series (even if there is not much difference in hardware), AMD started having issues with availability. Older GPUs have been pretty much sold out where there were some left and the newer 570/580 models are pretty much out of stock everywhere. If there are some units left they are with an inflated price tag, because the people selling them want to make some extra bucks from the lack of availability and high demand. It is not known how long this lack of video cards will continue, but things were slowly progressing towards this negative outcome the whole month.

We are pretty sure that one of the reasons is mining and the recent peak of the price and profitability of Ethereum that inevitably leads to more and more new miners and mining rigs getting built. It seems however that AMD was really not ready for an increased demand after the release of the RX 500 series, even though RX 400 GPUs were already selling a lot. It may take a couple of weeks for things to get back to normal, unless the craze continues and unless AMD is actually having trouble making enough GPUs at the moment to cover the demand. Maybe the fact that the company is preparing for the release of their newer higher-end Vega solutions has something to do with the problem as well.

Miners are already looking at the alternatives of using Nvidia GPUs that are available plenty on the market, because they are not as good deal for Ethereum mining like the AMD cards in terms of price/performance. If you however take out the Ethash algorithm (Dagger-Hashimoto) out of the equation Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs are actually pretty good in terms of performance/power usage ratio… just not as good in memory intensive algorithms where GPU power is not required as much. Mining aside, gamers already have no other choice but to go for Nvidia if they are currently in the market for a new video card with AMD GPUs being out of stock.

The people that were mining a couple of years back during the Litecoin craze will most likely remember a similar situation where things got out of control for a while with the exchange rate of LTC exploding. This was only temporary as everyone was rushing to get into mining the top altcoin back then and then the price went down and things started to get back to normal. There are no guarantees that the same situation will happen again though, but don’t forget that we may be heading for a POW to POS switch for Ethereum by the end of the year…

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