Biostar Adds Another AM4 Crypto Mining Motherboard (Update: Price)

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Update, 8/1/17, 7:58am PT: Biostar confirmed that the TA320-BTC motherboard will cost $75.

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Steven Lynch
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13 Comments Comment from the forums
  • ammaross
    Why do they even bother sticking not one, but TWO MOLEX connectors on the motherboard? PCIe risers (which are required to get 6x card density) nearly unilaterally include a power connector on a separate circuit board rather than pulling power from the motherboard slot. Maybe it's for the handful of miners that use the old ribbon risers?
    Reply
  • TechyInAZ
    I can imagine Ryzen 3 is going to be a really good CPU for mining.
    Reply
  • theyeti87
    Am I missing something here? These miners are using GPUs to mine, but this motherboard has only 1 x16 slot and the rest are x1? Not going to get a great hashrate from 1 GPU.
    Reply
  • Max_x2
    Pretty much every rigs are using risers. Said risers can plug in the smaller pcie slots (as well as full size)
    Reply
  • theyeti87
    19922193 said:
    Pretty much every rigs are using risers. Said risers can plug in the smaller pcie slots (as well as full size)

    That indeed what was missing from my understanding :)

    That makes sense, thank you.
    Reply
  • derekullo
    Mining doesn't need an x16 pci-e port to be productive.

    The only thing that matters is that the entire DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) fits into gpu memory as it currently does or else the device would have to store the remainder of the DAG in ram making the speed of the port relevant and most likely slowing the hashrate.

    Edit: Of course risers are being used. I thought that was self-evident lol.
    Reply
  • skyviper80
    19922006 said:
    Am I missing something here? These miners are using GPUs to mine, but this motherboard has only 1 x16 slot and the rest are x1? Not going to get a great hashrate from 1 GPU.

    You only need an x1 PCIe connection for mining. Hashrate isn't determined by the number of PCI lanes going to the card like with gaming performance. I have a 6 GPU Ethereum rig using x1 PCIe to USB adapters to x16 riser boards on all 6 slots, including the x16 slot on the mobo and they all hash at the same speed. The hardest part is getting the system to recognize all 6 cards. I had to disable all other onboard features except the PCIe and LAN connection. The USB does not work, no audio, serial and all SATA but the HDD slot are disabled as well.
    Reply
  • BulkZerker
    "So, why exactly are companies suddenly feeling the need to cater to miners? "

    Cause they stopped making the AM3 based solution the same time those $20 semptron processors stopped getting released?
    Reply
  • Nintendork
    AMD really needs to release the Excavator based Athlon 950 and the APU's for the AM4. As for now there's no way you can get an AM4 platform for cheap (<$100 cpu's) and upgrade later to Ryzen.
    Reply
  • msroadkill612
    nintendork

    e.g.

    e.g.

    https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-AB350-Gaming-3-rev-10#sp


    CPU AM4 Socket:
    AMD Ryzen™ processor
    AMD 7th Generation A-series/ Athlon™ processor
    (Please refer "CPU Support List" for more information.)
    Reply