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http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=14062839037

I'm very interested in this item, but I have no clue on how to decipher how much it actually costs, or how to even buy one. Maybe someone here can sell one to me?

WOW. Somebody gotta try this mofo out.

This can solve all my problems LOL. Screw the extenders !

How much does it cost ? Can it be trusted ?

We need some Chinese people here to help us translate !

As far as I can see it costs about 150 GBP shipped to the UK which is quite nice but I don't think it will work without many stales or something.

Someone needs to try it out for us if possible.

I can already see some problems with the CPU cooler placement ( need to get me a LP one then ) and the board flexing under heavy GPU weight and also problems with the connector to the MB location.

Also why not 8 connectors instead of 7 ? Maybe I can attach the eight board via the standard mobo with extenders ?

Also see that it has 2 onboard PCIe power 6 pin connectors which is VERY nice to supply the power to the PCIe slots ! Screw powered extenders and all that BS.

Get a board like this and you can easily put 8 * 5870s on one mobo with just 1 extender !!!

God, I hope this is real ! I will buy one ASAP if someone tests it and shows us it is geniune. I wonder why the designer guy does not post on here to advertise his product ? Maybe fake ?

I sure hope it is real !!!

It's just a fancy powered pci-e extender, I highly doubt stales will even be a factor. It'll be great for those snagging single gpu cards, but those using dual gpu cards likely will just stick to pci-e ribbon cables since most reliable boards have 4 or more pci-e slots.

saw this last week, looks awkward. have to be careful with cpu heatsinks, and all of the other PCEI ports are out unless you mess around with extenders. i guess it would be effective to use on a small board with just one PCIE slot.

1400 yuan works out to be about $220 USD, plus $7 for shipping. not exactly cheap.

This is the HOLY GRAIL for people like me without access to dual GPUs like 5970 and access to single GPUs like 5870 !

God, I hope somebody gets one here so we can see if this is legit and works properly !

8 single GPUs on a rig + this baby > 4 dual GPUs on a rig

in terms of heat produced and probably price too ( dual GPU is very expensive for some ) !

Looks to block the cpu heatsink, but that shouldn't be a problem for mining rigs where the cpu's are mostly idle anyway.

I'd have to consider putting something like that at the end of a 16x extender cable. Just attach that extender of their's into the expansion board and run the cable to it. You might have a slight clearance issue to consider with extender cable though. But that is easily remedied with either plcing the mobo on a shelf just below this unit with a 'slot' in the shelf for the cable.

I like the pic he has, showing it mining almost 2GH at Deepbit, presumably using this board.

Yeah and that way you can also place the eight GPU on the normal mobo position and have any type of CPU cooler you need !!!

I just hope this is legit because I need several ;D

Even better would be:
a) AMD joins the 21st century and makes drives work w/ unlimited GPU not just 8
b) the expansion connector is at the end of the board
c) the expansion boards are stackable

:)

1 mother board w/ say 4 PCIe16x slots
4 expansion boards
4 PCIe extension cables
=24 expansion slots of stackable goodness.

Yeah heat does rise but you could insulate the bottom of the boards.   Stack em up say 12" clearance between boards = 3 feet high.
Put a 3 foot box fan in front of the stack and another behind it.  Now attach the MB to one side of the stack and x PSU to the other side of the stack.  

:)

Lets see 24x 5970 = ~16GH per rig.

As an alternative to fans you likely could insulate the entire thing and hook it to an AC unit. :) :)

This thing is interesting but AMD drives kill the usefulness.  I mean building a 3x5970 rig is possible w/o extenders.  Even w/ 5870s getting 4,5, or 6 on a board with extenders is already pretty easy.   Paying $200+ to gain 2 more GPU isn't really worth it.  Just build another rig.
Hooking 48 GPU to a single motherboard.  Well now that is just cool.

keep dreaming, m8   ;D

Not a bad one though!

Yea, I would try and 'box' them in so heat from any one unit is not warming another.  I am overdue to post some picks of the cards I have mounted inside of Capri Sun boxes. It works marvelously at directing the air properly over the cards. Not to mention, they are slightly more protected than they otherwise would be.

Well, let's see...
$60 via board + $10 ram + $220 backplane for 7 cards. $41.43/slot
$50 am3 board + $30 sempron + $10 ram + $10 extender + $220 backplane for 8 cards. $40.00/slot
$80 am3 board + $30 sempron + $10 ram + $10 extender + $220 backplane for 10 cards. $35/slot (and lots of fun with 8 card driver limit)

vs.

$80 am3 board + $30 sempron + $10 ram + 2 $10 extenders for 4 cards. $35/slot.

Meh.

Shouldn't the vs comparison use 7 cards?

i.e.,

$80 am3 board + $30 sempron + $10 ram + 5 $10 extenders for 7 cards. ~$24/slot

Which I was hoping would make the standard version look worse. *slaps forehead*

edit; I suppose the other benefit would be the ability to use an even cheaper mobo with 1x 16x slot.

That's why I put that $60 via board there, cheapest board w/ cpu and a PCIe I could come up with quickly, atom boards w/ PCIe tend to be > $80 and any cheap AMx + sempron is also > $60.
Btw, where do you find a AMx board w/ 7 PCIe slots for $80?
And yes, I left out quite a few things. But start adding stuff like PSUs, materials/time for custom racks, PDUs, ventilation, ... and the whole thing gets overly complex. and the +$/slot ends up about the same.

This. That is why I have no interest in PCI-E expansion boards.

I'll summarise some points in that page as best as I can.

1. Prototype board.
2. It runs only 1x so it's not suitable for gaming. :D
3. Only tested in Linux. But should work in windows, as there is no software to install.
4. (If I read this correctly) There is separate 12V connector to power the cards connected to this daughter board. (I think you can see it in one of the pictures)
5. Chinese will take over the world. (j/k. My own words)

That's all.

I really don't know what to do guys, LOL.

Should I buy this ?

I think this is quite good where prices of 2*5870 << price of 5970 ?

Are you sure.

Price out:
"normal" rig w/ 3x5870 (no extenders necessary)
"normal" rig w/ 4x5870 (using extenders & entry level board)
"normal" rig w/ 6x5870 (using extenders & 6x PCIe board)
"extender rig" w/ 8x5870 ( low end board & 1x extender board)

then calculate entire system cost per GH of each system.  I think you will find that it isn't as good as you think.

The problem is AMD drivers.  Currently it is easy to get 4 graphics cards on 1 board.  Getting 6 is more complicated (and expensive) but certainly possible.

So while this is a 7 slot design you aren't gaining 7 GPU.  You are gaining 2 to 4 more GPU.  $200 for 2 to 4 more slots = $50 to $100 per slot.   No rig I have ever built costs $50 to $100 per slot (excluding GPU).  If AMD ever changed their drivers to allow 16 (or better unlimited) GPU per system well then it might make more sense.

How much worse are the open source ATI drivers for linux than the proprietary ones for mining? It seems that it should be possible to modify them to remove a limit, but if they perform badly then there may be no point.

There are no open sources drivers which are OpenCL capable.

Yeah open source drivers for mining would really be HEAVEN for me. Screw AMD and their crappy drivers and bugs.

Somebody with the skill ( like ArtForz ) needs to try and sort this out for us.

Look here to start :

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/GalliumCompute

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

Damn shame.

Amd doesn't provide sufficient data on internal workings of chip to write OpenSource OpenCL drivers.  Many have asked AMD claims they can't for industry trade secret and competitive advantage reasons.

Without AMD support it is unlikely any Open Source driver that takes advantage of shaders will ever exist.

Err, what?
Take a look at the Xorg radeon driver and how it does several parts of 2D acceleration on 5xxx and 69xx ;)

Yeah, I pointed that out above but D&T is under the impression that Intel and open source ATI drivers don't support OpenCL when in fact they do ( somewhat ).

If someone could let us use the damn open source drivers that would be magical. No need to have X server running anymore !

Artz didn't say open sources drivers support OpenCL.

You claim is incorrect.
No Open Source driver supports OpenCL despite a lot of asking by the community.  
Intel has no graphical driver which support OpenCL (they only support OpenCL on CPU).

Who is stopping you?

My understanding is that 2D acceleration was made possible with support from AMD.  My point was that adding OpenCL to open source drivers would require AMD assistance (assistance they have so far been unwilling to provide) not that it would be impossible.

Now that I can agree with.
The work required to add OpenCL support is pretty massive, and AFAIK there's pretty much 0 done on a open source OpenCL -> VLIWx shader asm compiler, several other large parts of the puzzle are also completely missing (runtime, runtime/opengl/driver integration/...).
But saying that the open source driver can't use shaders is wrong.
Now, for something like a dedicated miner for 5/6xxx you'd "only" have to handcraft a kernel for each arch in VLIWx ASM (fully documented in public AMD docs btw) and hack the radeon driver so it allocates input/output regions and loads/runs your shader program on command. Iirc there's still a open 200BTC bounty for a miner working like that. but it's a *lot* of work for very little benefit.

I think I understand.  So while it wouldn't be possible to implement OpenCL (which is rather expansive API) hack together low level support just for mining and implement that in a fork of OpenSource drivers?  The code wouldn't be openCL compatible but would function at a lower level.

Has anyone done a proof of concept?  Something simpler than mining maybe something as simple as loading an value, increment it in a loop and then read the output?

I never thought about doing it that way.  Hopefully someday AMD provides support for OpenCL in OpenSource drivers as that is a pretty ugly "hack".

Anyone tried this board ???

http://www.amfeltec.com/products/x4pcie-splitter4.php

I talkedto them about gpus on that thing and they say itll work ;)

price = highly unreasonable..
http://www.thedebugstore.com/acatalog/SKU-040-02-PCIe-Splitter.html

Price:£121.00 / €148.83 (Excluding VAT at 20%)