With the B250 Mining Expert, Asus has presented a unique motherboard for mining cryptos that can handle up to 16 GPUs, and 19 with the new driver to be released soon. 19 PCIe slots are used, of which 18 are connected to the graphics cards via adapters (riser).
Asus developed a new type of mining motherboard
Because many users diligently and massively mine virtual currencies such as Bitcoin and Etherium as they grow in price, whereby current computers quickly reach their limits due to the high computing costs. The mainboard manufacturers turned out to have a new market due to the boom of crypto-currencies and bring out the right substructure for desktop PCs. With the new motherboard models, the high number of PCI Express ports plays a significant role. By using as many GPUs as possible the computing power is increased, which accelerates the Bitcoin and Etherium mining. With its B250 Crypto-Currency Mining Expert, Asus has set a new record in this segment and installed 19 PCIe slots. Although Bitcoin requires a custom-made solution for mining such as (ASIC) miners, Etherium coins can be generated using a regular PCI-E video card; This is where Asus new Mining Expert come in handy.
At the moment of writing this article, the price of Bitcoin is – $4126.37, Etherium – $324.74. Along with Bitcoin and Etherium, there are a lot of coins that can be mined with GPUs such as Expanse(EXP), Monero(XMR), EthereumClassic(ETC), Nicehash-Ethash, Nicehash-CryptoNight, Musicoin(MUSIC), Zencash(ZEN and many others.
Details on the Asus B250 Mining Expert
This unconventional motherboard comes with the Intel socket LGA1151, which is one of the most popular Intel platforms. Below the processor socket, there is a total of 18 PCIe x1 ports divided into three rows. This design is interrupted by a single PCIe-16 slot, in which a graphics card can be used directly. The small PCI Express interfaces must communicate with the graphics cards via a riser. A different solution could hardly have been realized for the reasons of space. So that all the GPUs can get enough power, three 24-pin ATX connectors are allowed to be used with three power supplies. The Asus B250 Mining Expert is equipped with two DDR-4 memory banks, two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.1 jacks, four SATA interfaces and one Gigabit LAN.
The idea behind the motherboard
Asus was concerned that miners can build more efficient mining rigs and save by using as much Video Cards as possible on one motherboard. With such solutions, fewer motherboards are needed, which would otherwise be necessary for the operation of high numbers of Video Cards. This could also result in saving on additional memory and CPUs. Despite 19 PCIe slots, according to the manufacturer, only 16 GPUs can operate on this motherboard, since the drivers of Nvidia and AMD can drive a maximum of eight GPUs simultaneously. A new release of drivers is expected so that this motherboard can use all 19 Graphical Cards for mining this new type of cyber currency.
