Asus Unleashes A B250 Mining Motherboard With 19 PCIe Slots

By Steven Lynch
published

Yes, you read that right. Asus launched a B250 mining motherboard equipped with 19 PCIe slots.

First of all, before we get into this motherboard’s mining-specific features, let’s cover the basics. The Asus B250 Mining Expert supports 6th and 7th Generation Intel Core socket 1151 processors, up to 32GB of DDR4 2,400MHz, Intel HD Graphics support, four SATA 6Gbps headers, Intel's gigabit LAN, USB 3.1, and 8-channel HD audio for those of you that enjoy listening to music while you are mining. All fairly standard stuff.

This motherboard’s mining capabilities is where things get really interesting. Though we have seen mining-specific motherboards in the past support as many as eight PCIe slots, this blockchain beast offers more than double that amount with a total of 19 PCIe slots. This allows miners to utilize up to eight Radeon and eight GeForce graphics cards simultaneously.

In order to supply enough power to all those GPUs, Asus equipped the B250 Mining Expert motherboard with three separate 24-pin power supply connectors. Each connector is assigned to a block of PCIe slots, making it easier to upgrade as you add graphics cards to your mining rig.

Built-in PCIe slot state detection allow you to see the status of every slot in real time. This takes the guess work out of troubleshooting your mining rig. Asus has also added a boatload of decoupling capacitors (19 total) to ensure your GPUs get the power they need for reliable operation. Also, B250 Mining Expert has a special "Mining Mode" that's enabled by default. According to the company, this mode sets the PCI Express speed to PCIe 1.0 and disables the Compatibility Support Module so you get the best stability and compatibility from the moment you boot your system.

The B250 Mining Expert is available now with an MSRP of $150.

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AsusB250 Mining Expert
Form FactorATX
SocketIntel Socket 1151
ChipsetIntel B250
MemoryDDR4 2,400MHz
Memory Slots2
Max Memory32GB
PCIe1 x1618 x1
SATA III4 x SATA 6Gbps
LANIntel Gbe
I/O1x HDMI1x RJ454 x USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports2 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports3 x Audio jacks support 8-channel audio output1 x USB 2.0 / 1.1 onboard connector1 x USB 3.1 Gen 1 onboard connector
Price$150
Steven Lynch
14 Comments Comment from the forums
  • derekullo
    I'm torn between making a mining rig with the above or buying an Antminer S9.

    The mining rig with Geforce 1070s has some resale value once they become obsolete for mining versus the Antminer S9 having close to no resale value once it becomes unprofitable, although from what I'm hearing that may take a while.
    Reply
  • dstarr3
    Aw. I was expecting, like, a three-foot-long motherboard with full-size slots all the way down. You're not putting this in a normal case anyway.
    Reply
  • Rookie_MIB
    I wonder how this would also work for a folding rig? I can imagine that the workloads are pretty similar, and instead of mining for profit, we could instead contribute better to the dominance of Toms Hardware folding team in the annual Toms/Anand folding battle.

    Either that or you could make the mother of all PFSense routers...
    Reply
  • jonyb222
    "This allows miners to utilize up to eight Radeon and eight GeForce graphics cards simultaneously. "

    What can you do with the 3 slots that are left then?
    Reply
  • salgado18
    I suppose thinking about one of these with 8 gtx 1030 + 8 rx 550 to play DX12 games is just plain stupid... :)
    Reply
  • derekullo
    20200740 said:
    I suppose thinking about one of these with 8 gtx 1030 + 8 rx 550 to play DX12 games is just plain stupid... :)

    It isn't as stupid as you think.

    I could imagine such a rig with Threadripper running 16 different Eve instances at the same time.

    Eve encourages you to have multiple accounts.

    The only downfall here is that it is much more practical to use 1-2 Titans or Geforce 1080Ti to run 16 instances of Eve

    Reply
  • derekullo
    20200119 said:
    Aw. I was expecting, like, a three-foot-long motherboard with full-size slots all the way down. You're not putting this in a normal case anyway.

    I just pictured that inside of a long aquarium filled with vegetable oil.

    Like

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pqGgHhvke0

    But BIGGER!!!


    Vegetable oil is nonconducter of electricity as you probably noticed by bad things not happening in the video.

    Reply
  • dstarr3
    20200995 said:
    20200119 said:
    Aw. I was expecting, like, a three-foot-long motherboard with full-size slots all the way down. You're not putting this in a normal case anyway.

    I just pictured that inside of a long aquarium filled with vegetable oil.

    Like

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pqGgHhvke0

    But BIGGER!!!


    Vegetable oil is nonconducter of electricity as you probably noticed by bad things not happening in the video.

    I don't know why you'd use vegetable oil, that's going to go rancid before long and stink up the house, probably attract a legion of insects. Mineral oil is what you're supposed to use in such a circumstance.
    Reply
  • robodan918
    I just got this board today. The biggest problem it has (and I didn't know because the asus product webpage wasn't available until after I bought it) is that you can only address 16 GPUs whether in Linux or windows (which itself has a 10 gpu limit). This makes the "19" slots borderline false advertising, as they specifically mention the mining use case. Anyway it's still better designed than the asrock H110 btc+ (which has 13 pcie slots fyi) as the pcie slots are far apart and you can use powered risers. The only thing the asrock board has going for it is integrated power and reset buttons on the board. I have to buy extra switches now to turn on my mining board! Big oversight asus...
    Reply
  • dmylrea
    Not into mining at all, but wondered what kind of GPU cards one would plug into those tiny PCI-e slots? They certainly won't fit normal cards so there must be some sort of special GPU cards?
    Reply