Biostar TB250-BTC PRO Motherboard to Offer 12 PCI-E Slots

Biostar is apparently planning to release a new version of their TB250-BTC mining motherboard that is called Biostar TB250-BTC PRO. This is a bit confusing naming as the previous model is also from the Pro series of motherboards, so not that great idea, but anyway. The new Biostar TB250-BTC PRO motherboard will have 12 PCI-E slots or double the number of the regular mining version, so it should allow for up to 12 GPUs on a single board… in theory. AsRock has recently shown their own variant of a new Pro BTC crypto mining motherboard, namely the AsRock H110 Pro BTC+ Mining Motherboard with 13 PCI-E slots. It seems that the new trend is to offer higher density of GPUs on a single motherboard, that is of course if you manage to have more than 8 GPUs under Windows as with Linux things get more complicated for many users that rely on the familiar and more user friendly Windows-based tools. Biostar has listed the TB250-BTC PRO motherboard on their website, but there is still not much information and even a photo of the actual product available…

– See the official product page of the Biostar TB250-BTC PRO 12x PCI-E motherboard…

Comparing Bitcoin vs Ethereum Using Google Trends

Here is an interesting comparison between BTC and ETH for the last 12 months using Google Trends, the interest in Ethereum is still on the rise as you can see from the graph while the interest in Bitcoin is going down after the peak about 2-3 weeks ago. What is more interesting however is the Interest by region statistics, namely where the most searches are coming form. The top 5 countries for Bitcoin are Nigeria, Bolivia, Ghana, South Africa and Colombia… this rises some concerns, while for Ethereum the top 5 includes Netherlands, Singapore, Switzerland, Austria and Venezuela. Of course the number of searches for Bitcoin is much higher compared to Ethereum if you want to compare that as well and not look at the graphs separately just as a trend.

– You can check some more stats and do additional comparison on Google Trends…

The Creator of Litecoin Leaving Coinbase to Focus on LTC

The creator of the crypto coin Litecoin (LTC) – Charlie Lee has tweeted that he is leaving Coinbase and will going in order to focus on his creation. Good news for one of the oldest altcoins and a total change from the “no need of further development attitude” from the last couple of years. In the last couple of months we have seen significant changes in LTC and that has lead to the revival of the altcoin after a long period of “sleep” and the news that Charlie Lee is focusing his attention on Litecoin is also a very positive one. We are already seeing the market responding to this positive news with the price of LTC rising…

Dual SATA Power to 4-pin Molex Power Adapter Cable

With all our efforts failing when trying to find if such a cable exists as a products that you can order and get ready made to be installed we had to make one ourselves. Why would you need a cable like that anyway? With the abundance of SATA power connectors and just a few 4-pin Molex power connectors with all more recent power supplies you can end up with the need to have more 4-pin Molex power connectors, especially when building a mining rigs. Sure, you get plenty of SATA power to 4-pin Molex power adapter cable with the risers you buy for video cards, but they are all single SATA power and that is precisely the problem. Anything that requires a 4-pin Molex power connector can actually have a higher power usage than what a SATA power cable can supply in terms of maximal power rating. The result can be issues with stability and functionality due to overheating and melting SATA power cables due to higher load than what they are designed for.

The solution is just to get a 4-pin Molex power connectors (Female ones) and turn two SATA power to 4-pin Molex power adapter cables into a single dual SATA power to 4-pion Molex power one. This way you can connect two SATA power cables from a single line for peripherals from the power supply to a single 4-pin Molex power and get completely safe with higher power draw components. Do note that you still need to be careful not to connect too much of these adapters to a single power line going to the PSU as you may overload the total capabilities of the cable and/or more likely the ones of the modular power connector that is used to connect the cable to the power supply. More than two dual SATA power to 4-pin Molex power cables on a single cable is not advised with 60W per power adapter cable max load just to be on the safe side, even if they are actually able to handle a bit more.

Some more tips to help you stay on the safe side. Make sure that the peripheral power cables of your power supply are at last AWG 18 or lower number (thicker cables), so that they are able to handle more power. Typically good power supplies use AWG 18 cables for that and AWG 16 for the PCI-E power lines (especially if you have dual PCI-E power connector), but single PCI-E power connector per cable should be just fine with AWG 18 as well. When using two SATA power to 4-pin Molex power cable adapters for extenders make sure that they are also with AWG 18 cables, regardless if you build a dual SATA power cables like we do. There are some extenders that are being shipped with AWG 20 cables on these power adapters and this could cause even more serious issues if you try using them with higher power loads required, so try to avoid using these.

Be Careful Where You Buy Your Mining Hardware From

We are getting reports for a new trend that is peaking up recently with all of the shortages with hardware due to the boom in mining. It seems that some retailers will happily sell you their stock of GPUs and will then tell you that they will not give you any warranty or accept RMA in case of a problem if you are going to be using the video cards for mining. At the same time they are happily willing to sell you not only the GPUs, but all other hardware that you may need to build a mining rig. The problem here is that instead of clearly pointing that they will not hold any warranty for products used for mining, they take your money, ship you the goods and then inform you that there will be no warranty if the hardware is used for mining. This is just not the correct way of doing business… though it is hard to confirm what a GPU was actually used for anyway, it sounds more like a threat to the customer than something that can be truly enforced.

The main concerns with hardware used for mining are regarding the GPUs working under heavy load 24/7. This makes them prone to more issues as they hold higher operating temperatures, fans are more susceptible to failure (especially if not good quality ones) and as a result the cards can fail. Base on our experience however if properly cooled and maintained the fact that a good GPU is used for mining instead of occasional gaming is not really a problem. Most of the GPU failures usually happen in the first few days and are often caused by some small defect that is prone to result in an issue sooner or later anyway. All in all it is important that miners take a proper care of their mining hardware in order to ensure its long and reliable operation and if they do it good enough, then the trouble they will have are going to much less than if they don’t…

The problem is that there are a lot of people that are getting into mining that do not care about anything, they just throw a bunch of video cards somewhere and start mining and when there is a problem they just RMA them. They do not care about proper cooling, optimizing settings for efficiency or performance or anything else, they just want to mine and make profit from as easy and as fast as they can. We know for a fact that one of the most common RMA reasons are failed fans of video cards that are under warranty, again here some vendors are to blame as they are putting cheaper and lower quality fans. If you have good dual ball-bearing fans that are well protected from dust and do not have an issue with increased temperature you are much less likely to get into trouble. We are however still seeing cheap fans with bushings instead of ball bearings and not very tolerant to higher operating temperatures being widely used on not so cheap GPUs.

This brings us to the 3 month warranty that Nivida is planning to offer for their GeForce GTX 1060 9Gbps based mining GPU. It seems that they are also worried that a longer warranty might not be cost effective for products dedicated for mining, but then again it also shows that they may not be that ready for properly making mining GPUs… just more cost effective solutions. On the other hand if you look at the warranty that ASIC miners do come with limited warranty. For example the Bitmain Antminer S9 ASIC miner does come with a 180-day warranty starting from the date the unit is shipped to you. Baikalminer has just a 30-day warranty for miners. In general the warranty you get for dedicated mining hardware may vary from none to up to about 6 months period. However this is clearly stated before you buy the product, and not you getting a nice and not so pleasant surprise after you pay for it and get it shipped to you for example.

Seems Like Nvidia is Making a Video Card Especially for Mining

There is some information circulating around in the last couple of days that Nvidia is making a video card specifically designed for mining as well as some speculations that AMD is doing the same as well. While are know for a fact that this is true for Nvidia, we are having some doubts about AMD doing it with all the AMD GPU shortages we are seeing lately and the news they can continue for the next few months. With the lack of AMD GPUs on the market the miners started buying Nvidia GPUs, so very soon we are most likely going to see cards such as the GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 getting harder to find on the market. Higher-end GPUs are probably going to have better availability for now, but who knows if miners will move on to these as well if there are not other options available.

We know that Nvidia is focused on gamers and not as much interested in mining and miners like AMD for example, so they do not want to have availability issues of their GPUs just like it has happened with AMD now just because of the miners. So they have apparently figured a solution to the problem – just make a GPU intended for mining and miners and sell that to miners instead of their gaming-centered products. The card that they are building is an NVIDIA Pascal GP106-100 GPU that comes with no video output connectors, passive cooler (still needs airflow for proper cooling) and much shorter warranty – just 3 months. The idea is to have a more affordable price wise option for miners that can be used only for mining (hence no video outputs) and that could make it even more interesting alternative. The crypto mining GPU from Nvidia is apparently based around the consumer GeForce GTX 1060 9Gbps model and the price should be cheaper than that of the consumer model.

The information that we are seeing about the GP106-100 mining GPUs mentions some numbers regarding mining performance, the following numbers are for 8x of these GPUs: 200 MHS for ETH, 2500 Sol/s for ZEC, 4400 H/s for XMR. These numbers translate to about 25 MHs for Ethereum, 312.5 Sol/s for ZCash and 550 H/s for Monero and only the ETH number seems surprisingly high considering what we’ve seen in our recent test of the GTX 1060 9Gbps. So while the GPU might be essentially the same as on the consumer GTX 1060, there could be some differences in the video memory… maybe 256-bit memory bus or optimized memory timings intended for better performance. With a sub $200 USD prices these mining oriented GPUs could be interesting, but the 90-day warranty period could be a bit of a setback.

We’ve left the not so great news for last. The Nvidia GP106-100 mining GPUs will not be available on the regular market to the regular users apparently, they are going to be sold only in large volume to big customers such as cloud mining companies like Genesis Mining and/or other big private mining operations. So the whole thing should not make any difference to smaller home miners as they are most likely not going to be able to get their hands on the hardware anyway. That is of course prone to changing at some point if the crypto mining business continues to grow and forms a larger part of the revenue for companies like Nvidia, so that they could actually form a separate business unit to handle it. For now however the company does not seem to think that they should change their focus from gamers and gaming and mining is more like creating issues for them than helping… something that cannot be said is the same from AMD’s point of view where the market for their Polaris-based GPUs goes mostly in the hands of miners.

Enthusiasts Designing Specific Hardware for Crypto Mining Needs

The peak of interest in crypto mining in the last months has apparently sparkled the need for some interesting new products designed to help the users of mining rigs get things done in a better and more efficient way. As a result we are seeing enthusiast designed things like a power distributor board allowing the users to connect up to 4 power supplies that can be used to work together powering a single mining rig. Of course you can always go for a 2x PSU boards such as the Add2PSU, but what if you need to connect three or four power supplies? With Add2PSU you can use a number of devices to connect more power supplies together, but this will take up more molex connectors on the main power supply. Going for an optimized board that can use up to 4x power supplies together with a single molex from the main PSU is more convenient, especially if going for a 8x GPU mining rig with more powerful video cards that take up two PCI-Express power connectors.

Another commonly needed thing for multi GPU mining rigs is an easy way to connect multiple cooling fans to go along with the video cards by helping them get cooler air and eliminate the forming of hot air pockets around the GPUs. So getting an easy way to connect multiple fans, up to 6 for example via a single board powered by a 4-pin Molex power connector makes things much more simple and user friendly. Adding an easy way to select the operating voltages of the fans via jumpers and getting them to work at either 5V, 7V or 12V without the need of additional electronics is more than welcome. Of course you need not only to get good and useful functionality from a fan distributor board, but also make it affordable as with crypto mining extra costs are always considered.

While enthusiast designed products like up to 4x power distributor boards for multiple power supplies for a single computer or fan distributor boards with 6x fans and voltage control option may be interesting for regular users, however the real market for devices like these has opened with the boom of GPU mining rigs. The two boards that we are showing you here are just an example, there are other interesting products getting designed by enthusiasts for the crypto mining market as well. An interesting example of other such products is the SimpleMining SimpleRigResetter that allows for easy power cycling of multiple GPU mining rigs if they have an issue and hang up.