Posts Tagged ‘Biostar TB85’

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.

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…


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