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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday August 24 2017, @07:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the miner-49er dept.

ASUS will sell a motherboard that can support 19 GPUs. The product is intended for cryptocurrency mining:

ASUS this week teased the new "B250 Mining Expert" which boasts all those slots because – as the name implies – its role in life is mining cryptocurrency.

The board can't do it all itself, of course. ASUS' preferred GPU is the P106, a variant of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060), 1,280-CUDA-core, 1,506MHz affair that can surge to 1,708 MHz when required and boasts 6GB of RAM. ASUS' version is shorn of anything to do with displaying video so that it can smoke hashes to cook cryptocurrency.

Do the math: 19 GPUS, 1,280 cores apiece ... this motherboard could end up hosting 24,320 cores before you fill the Intel LGA 1511 socket with a Skylake, Kaby Lake or Coffee Lake CPU. That chip's half-dozen or so cores are hardly worth counting!

The board is also equipped to slurp three power supplies, because all those GPUs are thirsty. There's also a capacitor dedicated to each PCIe slot to make sure the juice doesn't fluctuate and upset the precious mining machines. A mining-specific BIOS that lets you manage all those GPUs rounds things out.

What do you do with this after cryptocurrency mining is dead?


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by toddestan on Friday August 25 2017, @02:59AM (1 child)

    by toddestan (4982) on Friday August 25 2017, @02:59AM (#558711)

    The thing I don't get (and the article doesn't really talk about) is how does one actually physically use all those slots? I assume that populating all those "slots" involve special mining GPU's in a non-standard form factor*. I suppose the slots closest to the rear are in the correct place for the installation of a standard PCIe x1 card which will likely physically cover up the two x1 slots in front of it. So if you wanted to re purpose the board for something else you now basically have a board with a x16 slot and 6 x1 slots. Unless they also make special SATA expansion cards that fit in those slots, I suppose.

    *That I also assume lack any kind of video port.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Fnord666 on Friday August 25 2017, @12:33PM

    by Fnord666 (652) on Friday August 25 2017, @12:33PM (#558824) Homepage

    The thing I don't get (and the article doesn't really talk about) is how does one actually physically use all those slots?

    PCI-e riser [newegg.com]cables [amazon.com].