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ASUS introduces $130 B250 Mining motherboard with support for up to 19 graphics cards
With the price of bitcoin setting new record highs on a daily basis, most recently hitting $4200, which made it three-times more valuable than gold - it would seem that motherboard manufacturers have joined graphics cards OEMs in trying to capitalize on the so-called gold rush. Companies like ASROCK and Biostar released motherboards that specifically support a high number of graphics cards since the process of mining requires an ever-increasing amount of processing power.
ASUS has joined the fray with its new B250 Mining Expert motherboard, which supports a record 19 graphics cards through individual PCI-e 3.0 x1 slots. Unsurprisingly, this introduced several stability issues, since the power draw would reportedly cause the system to crash. So to remedy this, the company grouped these slots into three separate divisions, with each receiving its own dedicated ATX12V 24-pin power connector.
Currently, the system can only support up to 16 - eight AMD and eight NVIDIA cards - at once, with a planned driver update reportedly pushing this to the full 19, once it rolls out shortly after launch. It still beats out all its competitors in its current state, since it's the first motherboard that supports this many cards for mining.
The process of utilizing the board to connect this many cards requires you to install PCI-e 3.0 x16 risers that connect to each individual card and each particular slot. This allows the system to send and receive the basic computational data during the process of mining, without taking up the space a standard PCI-e 3.0 x16 slot would demand, allowing miners to increase their hashing power at the lowest possible initial investment.
Beyond that, the board supports Intel's 6th and 7th generation processors, 32GB DDR4 RAM, and comes with one PCI-e 3.0 x16 (standard GPU) slot. Other features include support for four SATA III storage drives - although mining systems rarely require this many - and six USB ports. According to ASUS, the board will retail for approximately $130 in the US, which makes it cheaper and more capable than its closest competitors. It is expected to launch later this year.
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