I’ve made no secret that I have opinions about motherboard design. Asus just released details on a new motherboard, designed for the cryptocurrency mining community, and it’s something to behold. At first I thought the B250 Mining Expert (actually pretty good in the arcane logic of motherboard naming conventions) was photoshopped. Outside of crypto mining blogs, I wasn’t seeing anything official from Asus. After some searching, an official Facebook page has it listed, so it seems legit.
The audacity of this board is staggering. Sure, cryptocurrency mining has become a highly lucrative market for GPU makers. But right now, there isn’t even driver support in place to take advantage of all the slots. You’re currently limited to a kludgy mix of using eight AMD and eight Nvidia cards to max out the boards slots.
And even if drivers catch up, I can’t image Asus will retain the crown for the most PCIe slots for long. With AMD’s Threadripper supporting a crazy 64 PCIe lanes, it’s only a matter of time before an OEM puts even more expansion on an ATX-E board.
Still, if you’re in the market for a board that can draw more power than your house, Asus has you covered.
Crypto Mining Blog comments:
It seems that the race for a mining motherboard with the most PCI Express slots is far from over with the AsRock H110 Pro BTC+ and Biostar TB250-BTC PRO probably being only the start. It seems that Asus is planning on joining the party with not 12 or 13 PCI-E slots, but with 19, though you might be limited to actually using only 16 of them. We already know that you are limited up to 8 GPUs from a kind (AMD or Nvidia) under Windows, so 16 max if you mix them. With Linux though more GPUs from a kind that what Windows allows are usable, but then again more than 16 at this point might not be possible. This is probably why Asus are talking about this product as supporting 16 GPUs even though it does come with 19 slots.
Read more at: Asus B250 Mining Expert Motherboard with 19 PCI-E Slots
