Bitcoin Forum

Thinking about upgrading my hobby bitcoin rig and looking for some advice on a motherboard with an LGA775 slot (either an E5300, or a spare Pentium D) that uses DDR2 memory (either 800 or 667) and has at least 2 x16 slots and at least one additional x1 slot so I could expand to another GPU card. My local Microcenter has a great site to search by board specs, but they do not have anything with 2 x16 that still has another x1 slot.

Looking at an ASRock P45X3 (also seen written as P45XE  ???) motherboard that looks like it meets all my requirements and supports my E5300 LGA775 processor and my DDR2 memory I have laying around. It has two x16 and three x1 slots.

Anyone have any experience with this or similar ASRock boards on a mining rig? 

I haven't had any luck using x1 slots on 775 boards myself.  Not sure if it's something w\ the older chipsets or what. 

for the 2 x16 slots, great for a small miner.  My first miner was a 775 sli board i got for free w\ cpu :)

Hrm, I currently have a 5830 in my x1 slot using a x1 to x16 riser cable, which the system sees and it mines well. Although, the x1 acts in some ways like it's the primary slot, that's where the POST display is shown. I suspect this causes some of my stability issues I am seeing. I suspect it's because the x1 slot is closer to the CPU, it is actually first on the bus.

DONT use a ASRock 775XFIRE-ESATA2 LGA775.  It was the cheapest board with these specs on ebay except it wont boot with any AMD/ATI card I've put in it.  Even booting with any nVidia card (all of which worked), I still cant even see any AMD/ATI cards connected on 1x or 16x.

It might just be my board, but for sure they are all really finicky about memory.  Mine wont boot with two matched 1GB sticks, but will with one of them pulled out.

I've heard the ConRoe version of this same board will work but I haven't tried it myself.

Thanks for the feedback, that's good info to know. I was actually considering trying that board with an old Pentium D CPU I have lying around since it wouldn't work with my E5300, but looked more at the P45X3 since it has more 1x slots if I ever wanted to add several GPUs. Gonna have to do some digging to see how similar these boards are as far as chipset and bios.


EDIT: This is the board I am looking at:
http://3btech.net/asp4coqu16mo.html

Evga 750i sli fits your specs. Should be cheap considering the 780i three way sli board I have runs 3 cards no problem, and has a 1x pcie slot in there.

The 780i goes for around 80.

Are you seeking performance or value? Newegg has a board that fits your criteria in the recertified section.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131779

Not a bad board at all for $45! They also have great deals on 775 CPUs if you're looking to get one.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007671%204016&IsNodeId=1&name=Recertified

More 1x slots is great to have.  I see one big difference in the P45X3 from my board: it has a proper 8-pin power connector.  The board I have has the same molex from the back of an IDE CD-ROM drive.  It's quite possible my board wont see these cards because of bus power from PCIe.  Plus, the P45X3 specifically says PCIe 2.0, which is probably the other problem with my board being PCIe 1.0.

I'd be surprised if the P45X3 didn't work.  I may just order one to test it.

i have a 780i as well and it runs 3x 5870s flawlessly... i have not tried my 5850 in the x1 slot as i am waiting for my extenders to get here... has anyone tried to use the x1 slot for a 4th card on the 780i?

Couldn't find anything else that seems as nice in the same price range (the link someone posted on NewEgg was already sold out by the time I looked) so I went ahead and ordered the refurb P45X3. I'll post up how it goes after I receive it and get it installed.

@st4rdust : I like NewEgg and always price there, but even though tye have a little less stock I often find as good or better deals on basic parts at Microcenter.com and they have a local outlet I can order online and pick up and save the shipping and return locally if needed. If they have a store nearby you check it out, it makes great sense. If only they would accept bitcoin... :)

Definintely finicky about memory. Didn't like any of my sticks I had already. Had to swap back to my old board and ended up wasting a couple doses of IC Diamond.