Bitcoin Forum

What is up with this? Have I gone mad believing in something like this?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188091 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188091)

Almost looks like it was designed for BTC mining.

Sounds cool until the reality of price of the motherboard vs how many cards you can use with it and trying to power 7 cards. If you use this type of MB you need risers, a custom case solution and 2 large power supplies (~1000W) and some custom wiring to make it all work.  I'd estimate the per GPU cost of this solution to be $80 - $120/GPU. If you build with 3  GPU/MB you can use a much cheaper MB, a standard case, a large power supply and USB key.  If you count PS/Case/USB key that gives you overhead of  $75-$100/GPU. For me the ability to plug and play and lower cost make the decision easy.

Stupid part is that if you're going to be using risers, you might as well buy a MB with PCIe x1 slots, and use x1 risers.

So far the best I found (and bought) was the MSI Z77A-G45, which has 7 PCI-E slots. Unfortunately, when it comes to the 2 PCI-E 1x slots that are by each other, if you put a card in one of the slots, the adacent slot turns off, so it is essentially a 6 slot board.

Anyone tried this device (http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=14062839037)? It looks no bad, but is it really working?

That reminds me of the system rjk was working on for a while, but he ran into many problems.

After looking at the board more, it seems like it was invented for mining, but in reality, everyone is right. Power, cooling, and riser issues makes the board seem a little less ethical.

However, I still think it is pretty neat and could fill a hole for miners wishing to not need to order risers or case systems, but would rather wing it.

  Oh nice, it's just a refurbished SR-2 ;).  You could get away with perhaps 3 big cards in the rig but keep in mind, a 5970 will *not* fit in slots 6 or 7 because of the MB headers for power and so forth.  Shorter cards could probably fit just fine, though.

Mobo: $250
CPU/cooler: LGA1366 (Xeon) $125
2 PSUs: $300
1G stick ram: $10

$685 for 7 slots.  $97.85/slot

I build 4 slot rigs for $55/slot all day

GPU and riser cost is not included since that's the same for both regardless.

Extenders are key  ;)

I'd say OP's main problem will be finding the two incredibly expensive Xeon processors required  :P

Nope, that's a real legit board. You guys act like you've never seen dual socket boards in a server setup or workstations. EVGA had no thought of bitcoin when designing this.

I'm pretty sure I'm correct in saying that any chip that fits in that board, in combination with that chipset, would result in enough PCI-E lanes to allow that many slots to appear on a board so they did it :D high-powered intelligent routers would use a board like that with a bunch of network cards attached.