Posts Tagged ‘GPU Mining Rig motherboard’

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…

Choosing a Good Motherboard for a GPU Mining Rig

3, Feb 2014

asrock-pro-btc-motherboards-gpu-mining

Due to the demand for GPU mining rigs for cryptocurrency generation that are capable of powering more than 2 video cards (what is normally enough for gaming needs) some motherboard manufacturers have come up with specialized products especially for GPU mining needs. One such brand is AsRock that already has two specialized motherboards designed for GPU mining rigs and though the company uses Bitcoin mining all over these products, they are essentially for Litecoin and other scrypt-based alternative cryptos. Nowadays there is no more point in mining for Bitcoin with GPUs, you need to use specialized Bitcoin mining ASIC devices (for other SHA-256 cryptos as well), however scrypt mining and Litecoin in particular is still mineable with GPU. And a lot of people are still building new GPU mining righs with multiple video cards for mining Litecoin, so AsRock’s products can be ideal for these needs.

AsRock offers 2 models of specialized GPU mining rig motherboards, one is the cheaper AsRock H61 Pro BTC, designed for Intel Socket 1155 processors and the other one is AsRock H81 Pro BTC, designed for use with Intel Socket 1150 CPUs. Other than the use of different processors these two motherboards are pretty similar in what they offer – support for up to 6 video cards, though you will need to also use PCI-E x1 extenders to attach all of the video cards to the motherboard and you will also need a special rig designed to contain the 6 video cards. These motherboard also have additional 4-pin molex connectors that you need to connect in order for the motherboard to supply enough power to the video cards over the PCI-E slots.

Also if you plan on using all 6 PCI-E slots with GPUs you may need to be careful what OS you are going to be using in order for the operating system to be able to see and use all of the cards at the same time. Linux is a good option for 6 cards at the same time, and there are specialized Linux distributions available for mining rigs. The problem with Linux however is that the control of voltage of the GPUs may not work with all video cards, in fact with most you my have trouble changing the voltage of the GPU, though the clock frequencies are accessible and you can change them for better performance and higher hashrate. So also do have that in mind when building a GPU mining rig.


top