ASUS introduces the new B250 Mining Expert motherboard

The Taiwanese ASUS corporation, known for its hardware and electronics, has developed a special motherboard specifically for mining purposes. Sadly, no availability or price has yet been announced. This component has 19 PCI-Express expansion slots, which is not common for regular motherboards. 18 slots are PCIe 3.0 x1 and the last one is a PCIE 3.0x16 slot.

Source: HotHardware.com

Why so many slots? The main instrument used for mining is a GPU, or a video card, so all miners want to combine the resources of as many video cards as they could collect and connect. However, current NVIDIA and AMD GPU drivers support only up to 8 GPUs combined, although they are no doubt already developing new drivers that will fix this issue. AMD has specifically stated its plans to develop and release a driver that will support up to 19 video cards, while NVIDIA will certainly not stay ignorant about this issue too.

These 19 slots are divided into 3 groups. Every group has its own 24-pin ATX12V power connector on the right edge of this hardware. ASUS has also prepared a Post UI option that will allow the users to easily monitor the status of their GPU mining rig. If the LED goes green, it shows that the video card is in good condition. The red light equals problems, the gray light means that there’s no GPU installed in the slot.

Other features of this motherboard include Socket LGA 1151, compatible with Skylake and Kaby Lake Intel processors; four SATA 6 Gbps ports for storage chores; supports up to 32GB DDR4 RAM; has different modern USB ports, an HDMI output and a Gbe LAN port. It even has a BIOS already tuned for mining purposes, which further makes this hardware interesting only for miners, as a common office employee will not need this. Gamers might be interested, but this motherboard isn’t for them as well – mining and graphical rendering are completely different processes.