Ethereum-Mining: Crypto-motherboard for about 100 graphics cards

Biostar has announced a mainboard, which can control about 100 graphics cards via special riser cards. It should therefore be well suited for cryptowearing prospectors.
The company Biostar has announced the TB250-BTC Pro mainboard and expansion cards. It targets Mining machines for cryptosciences and has twelve unusual PCI Express slots to connect graphics cards. Via riser cards and special cables, the cards can be connected to 11 PCIe x1 slots, except for the PCIe-x16 slot. The comparatively low data transfer rate of PCIe x1 is not a bottleneck at Ethereum Mining. For example, Kolink is offering these riser cards at around EUR 15 ( Kolink ZURC-007, PCIe x1 to x16 ). You route the x1 signal to an external x16-sized slot via a USB cable.

Biostar has now shown on Facebook a picture with special riser cards , which divide the data stream of a single x1 slot on up to 13 cards. The TB250-BTC Pro can be connected to eight such riser cards and can theoretically operate up to 104 graphics cards. However, the corresponding riser cards are not yet found in price-cutting machines.

The Biostar-Board TB250-BTC Pro is already listed in Europe , starting from 175 Euro , but not yet available.

Ethereum-Mining performance of selected graphics cards with ethminer (measured with parameter "-G --benchmark")
graphic card Megahashes / s (MH / s)
AMD
Radeon RX 480 23.4
Radeon RX 570 21.3
Radeon RX 580 23.5
Radeon R9 290 24.7
Radeon R9 390X 28.5
Nvidia
GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 19.1
GeForce GTX 1070 8GB 27.7
Nvidia Titan X Pascal 31.4

Graphics cards for exploring
Graphic cards from 200 euros are still well suited for digesting the crypt diet ethereum. The scanning power is expressed in megahashes per second (MH / s). Radeon RX 470, Radeon RX 480, Radeon RX 570, Radeon RX 580 and Radeon RX 290 / 290X as well as 390 / 390X are particularly efficient. The Nvidia models GeForce GTX 1060, 1070 and 1080 also deliver a neat Megahash throughput, but are more expensive.

The ethereum boom has led to a scarcity and increase in certain graphics card models since the end of June. Meanwhile, the Ethereum euro exchange rate fell from its high in June from almost 350 euros to currently a good 250 euros .

AMD graphics cards allow Ethereum to use the OpenCL interface, while Nvidia graphics cards use CUDA. To compute can also be addressed several graphics cards at the same time directly - an interconnection via AMD Crossfire or Nvidia SLI is not necessary.