KNC Titan 2.0 Miner is a Convincingly Looking SCAM

16 May
2017

If you end up on a website claiming to be the relaunched KNC Miner trying to sell you a new Scrypt ASIC miner dubbed Titan 2.0, then you should know that this is not a website related in any way to the new owners of KNC Miner after last year the company went bankrupt prior to the last halving of Bitcoin (BTC). The KNC TITAN 2.0 miner promises to deliver 750 MHS Scrypt hashrate at 1300W power usage and a ready for mining kit including a power supply is being advertised with at price of $1499 USD, but it seems that this is not an actual product and just a convincingly looking SCAM trying to steal some of your hard earned coins (accepted payments are only in crypto – BTC, LTC, ETH, STEEM or XRP). So stay away and do not get mislead by the seemingly good offer, it is simply not real!

If you want to get an up to date specification wise Scrypt ASIC miner for mining Litecoin (LTC) or other crypto currencies, then you should go for either Innosilicon A4 Dominator or the more recently announced Bitmain AntMiner L3+. Both of these are confirmed actual products and work just fine for Scrypt mining, though you should still be careful where you buy your mining hardware if it is not directly from the manufacturer! The recent spike in the price of Litecoin (LTC) has sparkled more attention to the altcoin and as a result the number of people trying to profit at the expense of regular users have also increased, so it is advised to be careful what you do with your hard earned crypto coins.

8x GPU Nvidia Mining Rig With Asus PRIME Z270-A

14 May
2017

NiceHash have published some interesting experiments they have done recently, building an 8x GPU mining rig using the Asus PRIME Z270-A motherboard. This motherboard has 7 PCI-E slots as well as two M.2 SSD slots and they have utilized the 7 available PCI-E slots and one of the M.2 slots with an adapter to get 8 video cards working. Their experiment was with 8x Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 on that particular motherboard from Asus, though other cards will most likely work as well just fine. With the recent price spike and unavailability of cheaper 6x GPU motherboards for mining people are already looking into more expensive alternatives that work well for six or even more GPUs like this model from Asus for example.

It is interesting to note that one of the M.2 slots was turned into the PCI-E slot by using cheap M.2 to the PCI-Express adapter that can be purchased from Chinese sellers on Ebay pretty cheap. You should however be careful if/when using such adapters as sometimes on some motherboards the M.2 slots are shared with some of the PCI-E slots on the motherboard. The Asus PRIME Z270-A motherboard apparently can be upgraded to 8 GPUs using this method, or you can just use the 7 available PCI-Express slots for a seven GPU mining rig instead of the more traditional 6x GPU configuration. The only drawback, the Asus PRIME Z270-A are not the cheapest out there as they use the Z270 chipset and you additionally increase the cost for the M.2 to PCI-E adapter, but then again you also get to connect up to 8 GPUs to a single mining rig (if your PSU(s) can handle that).

– For more details about the 8x GPU Nvidia Mining Rig With Asus PRIME Z270-A on their website…

Biostar With The First Official AMD AM4 Crypto Mining Motherboards

11 May
2017

Just the other day we were talking about some potential uses of AMD’s new AM4 motherboards for Ryzen to build multi-GPU mining rigs and Biostar apparently has already have a dedicated solution available. The motherboard manufacturer is trying lately to get more seriously into the crypto mining business and gain larger market share by utilizing the recent lack of AsRock Pro BTC motherboards and other suitable for 6x GPU mining motherboards. Biostar is not new to the GPU mining scene with their TB85 motherboard supposed to rival the very popular AsRock H81 Pro BTC and the more recent release in the form of Biostar TB250-BTC motherboard, both of which were for Intel-based platforms.

The two new BTC motherboards from Biostar meant for use with AMD’s AM4 platforms are the Biostar TA320-BTC with AMD A320 chipset and the very similar model with B350 chipset – Biostar TB350-BTC. Both motherboards feature 6x PCI-Express slots (single x16 and five x1 PCI-E) needed for building a six GPU mining rig for crypto currencies and go with the bare minimum of extra features that are not needed by miners anyway with the idea to make the price more attractive. There are two external 4-pin Molex power connectors on the motherboards available, though you don’t really need them if you are using powered extenders for the video cards anyway.

Both new AMD AM4 motherboards (TA320-BTC / TB350-BTC) fully support all of the already announced and released AMD Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 CPUs and should support all upcoming lower-end AM4 models that we are expecting to see announced later thus year. The problem as we have already mentioned is in the fact that even the most affordable model at the moment, namely the AMD Ryzen 5 1400 is still a bit more powerful and expensive than what crypto miners are used to go for their GPU mining rigs with Intel processors. These two new motherboards will become much more interesting for miners when AMD introduces even more affordable Ryzen CPUs and especially APUs (with built-in graphics) than can make the cost of such a mining rig much more acceptable when compared to the Intel-based alternatives.

We are waiting to see what the pricing of these motherboards will be when they hit the market, though considering their specific target and lack of extra features to make them attractive for crypto miners they should be pretty interesting price wise. Again the problem is with the price of the currently available Ryzen CPUs that at this point do not make these motherboards like they could become if combined with a more affordable AM4 CPU that can become available soon (hopefully). The other problem is the availability of Biostar products, again we are reminding you that the brand is not as widely available and popular like AsRock for example… it is not even available on many markets around the world. So even with Biostar already offering multiple Intel-based mining motherboards and these two new ones for AMD AM4 are also coming it is not possible for many miners to get their hands on these products.

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