Asus Demos B250 Mining Expert motherboard with 19 pci-e-slots

Holy new forum skin!

Nice review. I would question the comment on the voltage stabiliser picture, surely you should always use a good quality PSU??

 

How could you possibly make a profit by spending so much on all this stuff?

 

By overproducing coins and destroying the power plants in the process?

Holy sh. The forum skin is nice and fast and smooth. Now if we could have such a nice fast smooth and mobile friendly overhaul for the main site that would be great.

 

I can't see how actual graphics cards can fit on that card. They look like PCIEx1 slots and three in each row so how do the cards fit exactly??? Surely only a single high end AMD or NVidia card can fit in each row?

 

They fit by using riser/extenders.

 

each card stand on a rizer like this one:

then you put GPU on stand like this:

of course you can't play CS:GO no more with this rig

 

AMD shows again his real interest "supporting" gamers.

AMD can't please gamers and miners IF they are "forced" to use the SAME GPUs for completely different goals.

IF AMD is unable to release a GPU variant specifically developed for the mining market (no gaming options at all and better mining hash rate) their dedicated gaming GPU market share will DECREASE due to the lack of performance per $.
This low market share, their bad gaming driver and GameWrecks are not helping game devs interest to optimize their titles for AMD gaming GPUs.

There is no need to hide anymore: they can do the right thing for AMD investors and push drivers to enable 19 GPUs per mobo."Only" adding support for 11 is not enough for miners.

 

No RGB?

Fail.

 

At first I was like "what's the point of having the 3x 24-pin connectors?" because the PCIe cards are getting their extra juice from the molex connectors. But then I realized a board like this makes it every convenient to do a multi-PSU rig. However, doing that is primarily only good for cost savings - I doubt such a specialized board is going to be cheap. So it still remains a somewhat strange decision.

As for the amount of GPUs supported, it wouldn't surprise me if that's just a Windows problem. I figure most hardcore miners don't run Windows. Not only could there be driver limitations, but you also have to deal with all those licenses and Windows is a real PITA when it comes to cloning. It's much easier and cheaper to get a bunch of 32GB SSDs, install Linux, drivers, and mining software on it, and then clone it for every rig you've got.


Anyway, this is a very interesting board - I've never seen anything like this. I don't really want it (I'm not into mining), but it is cool.

 

According to ethosdistro.com, it says up to 16 RX GPUs or 16 Nvidia GPUs; only R7/R9 is limited to 8.
I'm not sure if this is just the way the distro is configured, if this is a hardware limit, or if this is a driver limit.

I figure for some people, an easier route would be to use a VM and passthrough the remaining PCIe slots.

 

I think I saw the same thing. I didn't really understand why they did it that way - for most games, it is possible to use one install of a game for multiple users simultaneously, with or without a VM (I've done it myself). Not only does this dramatically save on disk space, cost, and download time, but it can even reduce load times since the data could be cached, either directly on the drive's own buffer or in RAM. If your goal is a multiseat gaming PC, a single high-capacity M.2 drive is arguably the best way to go. If mining in VMs is your goal, you could comfortably get by with a single HDD. I don't think mining involves enough disk writes to be a problem.

 

Nice board for miners but i thought that 10gb lan was needed for miners and this board only has 1gb lan.

 

Learn something new every day. Never saw that kind of setup before in 20 years of computing!

 

Do we have to get into this conversation again? Every single mining based hardware/info/etc. thread there is, this question, or negativity about mining, comes up. Personally, i don't think PC mining is worthwhile, ASIC seems to be the only thing worth while. But that doesn't mean this question needs to continue to be brought up for people to get into arguments about why mining is "evil" and how people must be complete and total nubs to think they could make a buck on it.

 

I find it amazing that companies are still keen on getting in on the mining craze. As someone who is familiar with mining, I find it difficult to justify such expenditures - even if the current price and difficulty remains constant, it will take months before you see a penny in profits. I can't imagine the amount of cards which will flood the second-hand markets after this thing blows over (POS can't come soon enough, IMO).

First of all, OEMs have created mining-specific cards, it's just that supply is not meeting demand. Second, these mining-specific cards are basically variants of gaming cards (the features that make a good gaming card also make a good mining card) so creating mining cards takes resources away from gaming cards. Third, AMD has been burned by the mining craze before (they had to write down tens of millions of dollars in unsold inventory when ASICs replaced GPUs for Bitcoin mining) and they do not want to risk getting burned again (this is why Dr Su was hesitant about fully getting on-board, unlike Nvidia's Huang, who has nothing to lose from mining).

The current mining craze has nothing to do with ASICs. There is currently no viable ASIC solution for mining Ethereum, which is why GPUs are used (GPUs are the perfect Ethereum mining hardware). Profitability is also a genuine issue - from what I've calculated, it will take about ten months just to recoup the costs, and it's getting worse as the difficulty continues to ramp up.