Biostar has announced the new iMiner 660MX8D2 with eight Radeon RX 6600 graphics cards for cryptocurrency miners. And no, it's not an April Fool's Day joke.
Believe it or not, Biostar is pretty active in the cryptocurrency mining scene. The vendor offers everything from mining-oriented motherboards to complete, plug-and-play mining machines. Biostar previously employed AMD's Polaris-based graphics cards, such as the Radeon RX 580 or RX 570. This time, the manufacturer opted for an RDNA 2 worker for the iMiner 660MX8D2, more specifically, the Radeon RX 6600M.
The iMiner 660MX8D2 utilizes eight Radeon RX 6600M graphics cards, the mobile variants of the Radeon RX 6600. However, the Radeon RX 6600 and RX 6600M use the same Navi 23 silicon with an identical shader count, with the only significant difference being the clock speeds. Therefore, Biostar probably just repurposed the mobile dies into desktop graphics. However, it's a common practice, and we've previously seen it with Nvidia's mobile GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card.
Biostar's Radeon RX 6600M 8GB features a cooler with a dual-heat pipe and dual-fan design. The graphics card has a single 8-pin PCIe power connector and offers three DisplayPort outputs and an HDMI port, which aren't necessary for a mining graphics card. It's a shame because these are legit gaming graphics cards that could have gone into the hands of gamers.
The eight Radeon RX 6600M graphics cards reside on Biostar's custom TB360-BTC D+ motherboard with the B360 chipset that supports old 8th and 9th Generation Intel processors. Biostar outfits the iMiner 660MX8D with a feeble Celeron G4900 dual-core chip to minimize power consumption and a 120GB SSD for storage. Unfortunately, there's only a single SO-DIMM memory slot for a DDR4-2666 stick up to 16GB. However, the important thing is that the motherboard provides eight PCIe x16 expansion slots (seven PCIe 2.0 x16 at x1, one PCIe 3.0 x16), so no riser cards are required. In addition, Biostar includes a 2000W 220V power supply to feed the eight RDNA 2 graphics cards.
Biostar advertises the iMiner 660MX8D2 as a hassle-free mining system; even beginners can get it up and working. It's a plug and mine product. The machine boasts an ETH hash rate of 248 MH/s, around 7% higher performance than Biostar's prior iMiner A588x8D2 miner with eight Radeon RX 580. The miner supports all the popular cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Monero, BTG, and Zcash - to name a few.
The manufacturer didn't share the price tag for the iMiner 660MX8D2, so potential customers will have to send an inquiry to Biostar about pricing.
