Asus Releases Mining Motherboard With 19 PCIe Slots

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rgMekanic

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Asus has released the new B250 Mining Expert motherboard. The new board features 19 PCIe slots, three 24-pin power connectors, and a mining focused BIOS, on an ATX form factor. It is socket 1151 with only 2 RAM slots, ASUS says it is designed to work with inexpensive Celeron CPU's.

Either ASUS is late to the party, or cryptocurrency mining isn't slowing down for now. Pretty impressive board for those into mining, at a very impressive price, the B250 Mining Expert is available at Newegg for $149.99. If you have or can find enough GPUs to feed this beast.

Graphics drivers from AMD and NVIDIA currently restrict systems to eight GPUs, so even if you draw from both camps, you’re effectively capped at 16 total. However, we’ve been working closely with AMD on a new driver that removes the upper limit for Radeon GPUs. Scheduled for release in Q4, that driver promises to fully unleash the Mining Expert’s potential.
 
And then you could also install some 1 to 3 or 1 to 4 PCIe breakout boards.

19x4 - 76 cards running off of one system.
 
rgMekanic said:
I think you may run a bit short on PCIe lanes at that point heh
Click to expand...

The breakout/hubs run off of x1 PCIe slots anyway, so it wouldn't matter.

See here for an example.
Molex powered:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/PCI-E-1X-to-4-PCI-E-16X-Slots-Riser-External-Adapter-PCI-E-Port-Card-Cable-Board/253135261847

PCIe power powered:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/1-X-4-Slots-PCIE-1-to-4-PCI-Express-16X-Slot-External-Riser-Card-Adapter-Board/152664601237

Edit: they are actually a switch of sorts. At least what I could find refers to them as switches.

So in theory you could keep stacking them to get more and more available x1 slots.

I couldn't find what the limitations on how many PCIe devices the PCIe bus can handle. Anybody know?
 
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The miners I know wouldn't bother with this. It's all about cheap cheap cheap. Buy the cheapest board with the cheapest CPU, put it on the cheapest PSU, and run as many of the cheapest mid-teir GPUs as you can. Sure, more expensive parts may net you better efficiency, but the price of that efficiency will very rarely be justified in actual earnings. Paying an extra $50 on better gold-rated PSU, may save you $30 a quarter on electricity, but in the world of miners, one quarter is an eternity. Waiting two quarters on an ROI is impossible for 90% of miners with how difficulty shoots up.

Now imagine asking these miners to pay an additional $100 on a fancy mainboard.
 
The board is quite inexpensive. Useful mining cards, however, are not.

The current economics of such an endeavor when including all costs are poor -- but then anyone who really wants to mine doesn't care. :dead:
 
A couple of people in my family were dabbling with the idea of running a miner of some kind. Originally (especially after China's kibosh on mining and subsequent fall in price) I suggested that it might be a very long time before the expenditure yielded anything but something like this seems compelling.
 
KazeoHin said:
The miners I know wouldn't bother with this. It's all about cheap cheap cheap. Buy the cheapest board with the cheapest CPU, put it on the cheapest PSU, and run as many of the cheapest mid-teir GPUs as you can. Sure, more expensive parts may net you better efficiency, but the price of that efficiency will very rarely be justified in actual earnings. Paying an extra $50 on better gold-rated PSU, may save you $30 a quarter on electricity, but in the world of miners, one quarter is an eternity. Waiting two quarters on an ROI is impossible for 90% of miners with how difficulty shoots up.

Now imagine asking these miners to pay an additional $100 on a fancy mainboard.
Click to expand...

But if they are having to only buy one board and one CPU and one set of RAM instead of multiple boards and multiple CPUs and multiple sets of RAM to accomplish the same thing, the cost is instantly lowered. And the power bill will be lower as well.
 
Just buy the coins you get a much better roi and its way easier. its a pain in the dick when you have 5+ systems and 15+ gpus
 
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cyclone3d said:
But if they are having to only buy one board and one CPU and one set of RAM instead of multiple boards and multiple CPUs and multiple sets of RAM to accomplish the same thing, the cost is instantly lowered. And the power bill will be lower as well.
Click to expand...

But it also is a special order item, requiring not only a higher price, but also lack of availability, difficulty in resale, issues and delays with warranties, shipment time etc. The truth is that you can run to your local ma'n'pa shop and pick a celeron + mainboard + ram for less than $100 bucks and have everything instantly to start making money.
 
KazeoHin said:
But it also is a special order item, requiring not only a higher price, but also lack of availability, difficulty in resale, issues and delays with warranties, shipment time etc. The truth is that you can run to your local ma'n'pa shop and pick a celeron + mainboard + ram for less than $100 bucks and have everything instantly to start making money.
Click to expand...

Heh, you think ASUS products have warranties? :ROFLMAO:

These aren't for the people running 1-2 cards. They are for larger operations.
 
I gave up mining a long time ago, still have .6something of a Bitcoin, should probably spend it.
 
KazeoHin said:
But it also is a special order item, requiring not only a higher price, but also lack of availability, difficulty in resale, issues and delays with warranties, shipment time etc. The truth is that you can run to your local ma'n'pa shop and pick a celeron + mainboard + ram for less than $100 bucks and have everything instantly to start making money.
Click to expand...
Difficulty in resale should not be a problem (assuming mining doesn't bite the dust).
Was among the very first to mine BTC on Butterflylabs FPGAs, and resold them for 1.8X when I quit GPU + FPGA mining not long before ASICs came out.
Not bad for very, very sloppy seconds :)
 
KazeoHin said:
But it also is a special order item, requiring not only a higher price, but also lack of availability, difficulty in resale, issues and delays with warranties, shipment time etc. The truth is that you can run to your local ma'n'pa shop and pick a celeron + mainboard + ram for less than $100 bucks and have everything instantly to start making money.
Click to expand...

Theres a link to newegg in the article where you can buy it right now, dunno where you're getting that it's special order
 
Only crappy part is you basically have to use linux to get that many gpu's of the same manufacturer working.

And most mining software in windows won't go over 8 cards without crashing.
 
Meh, it's easier to do the 4u case with 6 mid tier gpu's and rack mount it all in a cabinet and stick it in the row with the other cabinets.

This looks like a cabling nightmare
 
If only AMD/Nvidia added a hardware check to verify the cards can negotiate more than 8x(SLI) or 4x(Crossfire) before it enables all resources of the card.
 
I think it would be neat to build such a system to do BOINC projects instead. could get me some MAD seti@home or such scores

LOL
 
whatevs said:
If only AMD/Nvidia added a hardware check to verify the cards can negotiate more than 8x(SLI) or 4x(Crossfire) before it enables all resources of the card.
Click to expand...
you don't use SLI or Crossfire when you mine.

Lots of confusion in this thread. The reason people use 6GPU boards is because 12 and 13 GPU boards and now 19 GPU boards are only recently brought to market.

ASRock 110 pro btc+ (13 GPU)
Biostar tb250-btc pro (12 GPU)
This new ASUS one for 19 GPU.

Most of the miners I've talked to just haven't tried them yet because they weren't even aware they existed until recently. The motherboard doesn't cost more - it costs less - because now you are only buying 1 CPU, 1/2 the memory, and you can link up to three PSU's on this single motherboard natively. The biggest detriment is that Windows only supports 8 GPUs from Nvidia, or 8 GPUs from AMD. You can't have more than 8 right now. So you either use Linux, (simplemining OS, or somethign equivalent) or you'll be limited to 16 GPUs.

This new ASUS has the added bonus of software being able to indicate which card is failed of the 19 slots. That's a nightmare to figure out with 12 cards in my two Biostar mining 12 GPU mining boards.

These will sell well, given the price, name brand, and functionality. I'd like to buy one - but just don't have the need right now. I'm running two of the Biostar 12 GPU motherboard mining rigs and that's enough expense for now.
 
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Finally a system that I can really expand.
I'd have about 60 USB ports, 24.4 surround sound, 2 LPT, 2 RS232, oh man... finally.
 
rgMekanic said:
Theres a link to newegg in the article where you can buy it right now, dunno where you're getting that it's special order
Click to expand...

He's just glanced at your post, not even clicked the link to the article, and made some self assured assumptions. Suddenly he knows enough to get in the forums and tell everyone his opinion. Happens all the time these days.
 
Archaea said:
you don't use SLI or Crossfire when you mine.

Lots of confusion in this thread. The reason people use 6GPU boards is because 12 and 13 GPU boards and now 19 GPU boards are only recently brought to market.
Click to expand...
It was a pretty simple sentence. Your reading comprehension fail so you can thread crap your brilliance is...

whatevs said:
If only AMD/Nvidia added a hardware check to verify the cards can negotiate more than 8x(SLI) or 4x(Crossfire) before it enables all resources of the card.
Click to expand...
 
whatevs said:
It was a pretty simple sentence. Your reading comprehension fail so you can thread crap your brilliance is...
Click to expand...
I'm going to assume English isn't your primary language.

What are you trying to say?
 
For every rig I build I use a used $50 dual 1366 board. A $3 Xeon and some stupid cheap ddr3 ecc ram. High quality insanely low cost. The only issue i see with this board is if something breaks 20 cards are offline. That's alot of lost profit
 
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