Large manufacturers continue to produce specialized equipment for miners, even taking into account the decrease in the total capitalization of this market. So, ASUS
presented its new motherboard H370 Mining Master, designed specifically for creating GPU-rigs.
The new product of the Taiwanese giant allows you to simultaneously connect up to 20 video cards. The H370 Mining Master is a continuation of another ASUS product, the
B250 Mining Expert motherboard, released in 2017.
Among the serious differences, it is worth noting the use of the Intel H370 chipset and the support of eighth generation processors (LGA 1151 v2) in the new motherboard. Of course, the new motherboard has a full-size ATX form factor.
A complete list of the currently declared characteristics of the new board.But the most serious change was the refusal to place on the board the standard for mining solutions of PCI-e ports x1 for connecting video cards and replacing them with a PCIe-over-USB 3.1 system. Now the miners do not have to use the “
PCI-e x16 - USB - adapter to PCI-e x1 ” type of construction and it will be possible to limit it to only one “PCI-e x16 to USB 3.1” adapter. The final transition from USB 3.1 to PCI-e x1 is already integrated into the board itself.
ASUS engineers justified their decision quite simply: fewer moving parts and adapters - more reliability. Indeed, due to an excessive amount of physical connections, miners quite often faced situations when the card was disconnected from the motherboard for such a banal reason as somewhere else was gone. Also, the new solution simplifies the installation of the farm.
In addition, ASUS engineers went further, and together with the H370 Mining Master motherboard, special diagnostic software is now supplied that can monitor the video cards connected to it. It is extremely simple and straightforward, but still useful and allows you to determine which of the connected cards stopped working:
The release of specialized motherboards for mining equipment manufacturers began relatively recently. The closest competitor to the new H370 Mining Master from ASUS is the board from ASRock H110 + BTC. This motherboard supports up to 13 GPUs and also has additional PCI-e x1 ports for connecting video cards.
Another solution for miners is the Biostar TB250-BTC Pro with support for up to 12 GPUs. The overwhelming majority of other solutions offer support for only 6-8 video cards and cannot even compare with the B250 Mining Expert, the previous model from ASUS.
The main competitive advantage, of course, apart from the support of Intel processors of the eighth generation and 20 video cards on board, is the rejection of PCI-e x1 and the transition to a USB 3.1 connection. Discussion of numerous adapters with PCI-e x16 to PCI-e x1 has been conducted by the blockchain community since 2013, and during this time the use of such crutches has become the norm. With its engineering solution, ASUS brought GPU mining to a fundamentally new level of comfort, significantly increasing the stability of the entire system through this fairly obvious solution.
A full-fledged presentation of the new motherboard will be held at the Computex 2018 in Taipei, which will be held from 5 to 9 June. There, representatives of the company will demonstrate their novelty in the case. The start date of deliveries and the price of the new H370 Mining Master is still unknown, but ASUS representatives state that it will be possible to purchase a motherboard in a few months.
