Biostar has announced a new motherboard, though we question the use of the word motherboard. The new board that Biostar has announced is the BTC-24GH which, as its name indicates, is a board built for mining bitcoins and features a performance level of 24 GH/s – equivalent to about 30 Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards. It is made using ASICs and works over a COM interface connected with a USB to COM dongle.
The board itself will consume about 130 W under full load, which is notably less than what 30 HD 7970s will consume. In fact, it is roughly 50 times less power. This might just make bitcoin mining brutally profitable again, though it is known that the more computational power that is available in the world, the harder it becomes to mine bitcoins.
The BTC-24GH boards can also be stacked with a recommended height of up to four boards, though the entire system can be expanded to an array of about 50 boards. Do the math, and you'll realize that's a staggering 1200 GH/s.
What will this cost? Well, that remains unknown; it also remains unknown how attractive it is to buy these units. That said, even if a single board costs the same as 30 HD 7970s, it is the significantly lower power consumption that will help you earn bitcoins. The company did indicate that the BTC-24GH boards are shipping immediately.
Hopefully, these boards will become popular enough to allow prices of graphics cards to settle a bit again...
