Biostar introduced a motherboard for 12 video cards

The massive craze for mining Ethereum is gaining momentum. Thanks to this cryptocurrency, GPUs are again relevant, since ASIC is not suitable for it. Top-end video cards scatter like hotcakes (and some are not available at all, for example, the RX 470 is nowhere to be found anywhere these days). Manufacturers perfectly see the trend - and offer new products designed specifically for miners.



Biostar has released the world's first motherboard with 12 native PCI-e 3.0 connectors . Biostar TB250-BTC Pro is a platform for a real mining farm, otherwise why do you need 12 video cards?







The previous motherboard model for eight Biostar video cards was shown at Computex 2017 - and it was well received by the public, as were the earlier H81A and TB85 models with six connectors, which were also used by the miners. Therefore, the company decided to further increase the momentum. Currently, the TB250-BTC Pro is the only motherboard on the market that is equipped with 12 PCI-e 3.0 slots.



The board supports connecting graphics to both AMD and Nvidia at the same time.







The company believes that its motherboard with 12 video cards is the most profitable solution for mining in terms of price and performance. If earlier it was necessary to install two machines with two motherboards with six video cards, each of them had to buy a separate CPU, a separate SSD and DDR4 memory. That is, all this had to be bought two pieces each, and now one CPU, one SSD and one DDR4 module are enough. According to estimates by Biostar, there is a saving of $ 200 with the same mining performance, for example, on six RX 470 video cards and six GTX 1060, although power supply units still have to buy two. Biostar calculations are shown in the table.







According to the manufacturer, based on the current cost of cryptocurrency and 246.6 mega hashes / s, the new video card pays for itself 18 days faster than mining with the same number of video cards on two systems, which cost $ 200 more. The return on investment is reduced from 97 days to 79 days. Naturally, this is a theoretical forecast with many unknowns, the reality is not as optimistic as it seems to Biostar.







Biostar emphasizes that in this model, PCI-e slots are located farther from each other than other manufacturers, which reduces the risk of short circuits and increases stability.







For the same purpose, solid-state capacitors and hard power management modules are used in motherboards.



On the motherboard standard connectors for connecting peripherals: two PS / 2, DVI, four USB 2.0 ports and four USB3.0, gigabit LAN.



The following processors are supported: Intel Core i7 LGA 1151, Intel Core i5 LGA 1151, Intel Core i3 LGA 1151, Intel Pentium LGA 1151, Intel Celeron LGA 1151. The maximum TDP is 95 watts. Two connectors for DDR4 2400/2133/1866 MHz memory modules.



The popularity of mining forces manufacturers of video cards to release new video cards specially designed for mining cryptocurrency. Recently, ASUS released the MINING series video card: this is the MINING RX 470 with 4 GB of GDDR5 video memory and a clock speed of 926 MHz (accelerates to 1206 MHz).





MINING RX 470



The card with two fans is designed to operate in 24/7 mode, that is, around the clock without interruption.



In turn, another miner graphics card MINING P106 (1506-1708 MHz, 6 GB of DDR5 memory) was released for Nvidia franchising.



Both video cards come with a special program, GPU TWEAK II, which allows you to adjust the clock frequency of the GPU and memory, while tracking the hashrate and power consumption in order to choose the most optimal settings.



In July 2017, Biostar joined the number of manufacturers of mining cards, launching the RX 470D.





Biostar RX 470D



In some modern video cards for mining, like in the GeForce GTX 1060, there are no display connectors at all. Why burden the board with unnecessary chips if the display for mining is not needed?



By the way, according to rumors , AMD intends to slightly modify the Radeon RX 460 and release a model of the Radeon RX 560D - also with the miner.



Analysts hope that all these new mining graphics cards will help the market to cope with the severe shortage of standard Radeon RX 4xx and RX 5xx video cards, reducing the demand for them. These models miners immediately sweep out of the market, which is why gamers - for whom these video cards were originally created - have problems.