New Motherboard for 6x GPU Mining Rigs from Biostar

17 Mar
2017

AsRock is without a doubt the most popular manufacturers of motherboards designed for GPU mining rigs thanks to their H81 Pro BTC model, however lately the company is having trouble providing enough motherboards for GPU miners. There have been shortages of AsRock H81 Pro BTC motherboards and the demand is pretty high with new GPU mining rigs getting built a lot once more. The H81 chipset is getting old and there haven’t been more up to date BTC motherboards getting released with a newer chipset from AsRock either and this is apparently opening up some opportunities fro other manufacturers…

Entering Biostar with their new model TB250-BTC that is apparently intended for GPU mining rigs with up to 6x video cards and to additional 4-pin Molex power connectors onboard, just like on the AsRock Pro BTC series. To our knowledge this is the first motherboard intended for 6x GPU mining rigs with an up to date chipset, based on Intel B250 and supporting socket 1151 CPUs and DDR4 memory. The motherboard even has an M.2 slot available for installing onboard SSD modules, a feature that might also be interesting for some GPU miners. The only problem with Biostar as a brand is the limited availability on many markets or the total lack of such, unlike AsRock that is available on much more markets worldwide. The Biostar TB250-BTC in not the first attempt at such a solution from the company, they previously had the Biostar TB85 motherboard that also came as an alternative to AsRock’s H81 Pro BTC, but it never got too popular since it was also hard to find on many markets and was more expensive.

It is not like there are no other interesting alternatives available to the popular AsRock H81 Pro BTC motherboard with more recent chipsets, but since they are not designed for GPU mining rigs specifically they may not all work or may need some special settings and tuning. There are some interesting motherboards with the latest generation chipsets from Intel such as B250/H270 that come with 6 PCI-E slots and at a good price, though they may need some tinkering with the BIOS settings in order to make them work properly for mining. The price is important factor when building up a GPU mining rig and you don’t normally want to spend that much on a motherboard and CPU, especially if you don’t need any of the extra features or performance provided by the more expensive solutions… lower cost means faster ROI.

If you want to take a look at these alternative offers for possible good choices for 6x GPU mining rigs take a look at the offers from AsRock, Asus and MSI with B250/H270 chipsets that do have 6x PCI-E slots. On these however you need to switch the PCI-E to Gen 2.0 or Gen 1.0 and also force the TOLUD or Top Of Lower Usable Dram setting in the BIOS to 3.5 GB manually and not leave it to Auto mode as it is by default. You may want to make sure that the BIOS of the motherboard you go for has this BIOS option available, as otherwise the operating system may have issues properly assigning resources for all 6 GPUs and they many not work.

– For more details about the Biostar TB250-BTC motherboard for 6x GPU mining rigs…

Online Demo of the xOS Interface of Minebox

16 Mar
2017

The creators of the Minebox NAS storage with support for SIACoin (SC) have made available an online demo of the xOS interface that their devices apparently use, allowing users to get a feel on what to expect from the devices. Minebox is still running their limited pre-order of 200 units with 138 left to go, so you can still reserve yours if you are interested in the project and also want to support it. The sale is running a bit slow with some users not liking very much the higher price of the devices, but then again getting an NAS solution with the same HDDs for storage probably won’t be much different price wise and it will not have the features Minebox has.

– To check out the online demo of the xOS interface of Minebox…

Storj is Now Out of Beta, Get 25GB Free Decentralized Storage

14 Mar
2017

Just about a week ago we have covered our 1 month long test of Storj while the service was still in beta and now they have announced that the Beta stage is over already. Storj, a Blockchain-based encrypted cloud storage service, allows users to get cheaper and reliable storage as compared to traditional storage solutions out there and also allows users with free space to rent it and get some extra income for the data being stored on their computers. It is an interesting concept and Storj is not the only service that is exploring the capabilities of the blockchain for that kind of usage as well as the use of a crypto token.

Since not that much has changed in the last week when we last used the service you can check the previous post linked above with some of our freedback and experience. The main concern we have at the moment is regarding the ease of use for users wiling to store their data on the Storj network… it just isn’t as easy as you’d normally expect. That, combined with the fact that Storj is offering 25GB of space and 25GB of traffic monthly for 12 months is making it harder for users that have some free space on their hard drives that want to make it usable and earn something back for renting it to Storj. Of course the service needs to attract users and their initial free offer sure does seem interesting in getting users to give it a try, but then again they also need to work on making it easier to store and access the data on the network.

If you pass the free space and traffic that you get when you sign up you will be charged at $0.015 USD for extra GB / month and $0.05 USD per GB of traffic, though the free 25GB should be enough for many users. After the initial 12 months promotional period you will need to pay for the storage space and bandwidth you will be using and unfortunately even though Storj has their own crypto token, you are not able to use any SCJX coins to pay for storage currently… you can only earn these tokens if you rent your hard drive space. So this is something that also needs more work in order to close the ecosystem and this is apparently something that is already planned in the future.

– You can check out the official website of Storj for more details…

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