This May 30, the electronic components manufacturer ASUS spread by different means the launch of H370 Mining Master, its latest mother card destined to the cryptocurrency mining.
The most outstanding feature of the H370 is the ability to support up to 20 video cards (GPU) directly connected to the motherboard by vertically placed PCIe-on-USB ports. These ports directly feed the Intel H370 chipset. With this configuration, they reduce the size of the motherboard by compacting the USB ports and eliminating the PCIe x1 riser component that is generally used to connect the GPUs.
Given this ability to place GPU, in its press release mention a possible configuration with 12 Radeon RX 470 and 8 NVIDIA P104 cards, with which they have taken full advantage of the motherboard in their demonstrations. To feed this amount of video cards, the company designed a type of connection with 3 power sources, where each one feeds a group of USB ports of the GPU, without requiring synchronization between the sources. The user only has to be careful to connect the cards of the same group to the sources.
This motherboard was designed for industrial scale mining facilities. Therefore, on the tablet, each port is identified with a numeric panel that indicates the number of the card that generates problems and a power button and reset. All these attachments are for a simpler installation of the mining rigs and a quick identification of problems when they arise.
In their statement, they claim to have optimized the drivers and the BIOS of the card to allow a stable mining. They developed a software that monitors and controls in real time the behavior of the cards, to avoid any downtime.
It has dimensions of 30.5 x 23.1 cm. It has an LGA 1151 CPU socket for Intel 8th generation processors, Pentium and Celeron. It also allows 2 DDR4 RAM of 2666/2400/2133 MHz, together allowing a maximum of 32 Gb. A PCIe slot of x16 pins, where you can connect a GPU by canceling one of the USB ports of GPU and 10 USB ports for different uses .
With this new motherboard, ASUS is overcome after having released in mid-August 2017 its B250 Expert Mining Motherboard that allowed to connect up to 19 cards, also optimized for mining, but with fewer attachments than this new version. At the time, they took that component for sale at about $ 130, so it could be expected that the H370 cost more than that amount.
This year has started with a strong momentum of mining with ASIC, when several equipment for different mining algorithms came onto the market. Event that apparently has not affected the mining components market with GPU, in view of the success that ASUS obtained in the sales of its previous motherboard which is an important bet to the processing of data with video cards.
Featured image by ASUS 📷