AMD motherboard/CPU for GPU mining rig?

[Onbusy]

I notice most, if not all, people use the intel 1151 socket motherboard/CPU for building mining rigs.  Is there a reason people don't use the AMD boards?  Right now it's hard to find the intel boards, and they are more expensive.  Finding an AM4 socket board with 6 pcie slots and 2 M2 slots is cheap and easy.

Something like this:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157761

after mail in rebates, it's only $55.  6 pcie slots and 2 M.2 slots for a possible 8 GPUs.

Low end AM4 processors are out now too, with the Athlon x4 and APUs.

Just curious if they just plain don't work, or if people were just using the intel boards because they were cheap and easy to get ahold of at the time.

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[fapar]

I notice most, if not all, people use the intel 1151 socket motherboard/CPU for building mining rigs.  Is there a reason people don't use the AMD boards?  Right now it's hard to find the intel boards, and they are more expensive.  Finding an AM4 socket board with 6 pcie slots and 2 M2 slots is cheap and easy.

Something like this:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157761

after mail in rebates, it's only $55.  6 pcie slots and 2 M.2 slots for a possible 8 GPUs.

Low end AM4 processors are out now too, with the Athlon x4 and APUs.

Just curious if they just plain don't work, or if people were just using the intel boards because they were cheap and easy to get ahold of at the time.

Look for forum topics about motherboards on the B350 - and you will be surprised that you can not run more than 3-4 video cards.
The problem is the number of PCI-e lines in the chipset and the processor. The presence of a large number of PCI-e slots does not mean that they will all work.

Specifications:

AMD Ryzen series CPUs
- 2 x PCI Express 3.0 x16 Slots (single at x16 (PCIE2); dual at x16 (PCIE2) / x4 (PCIE4))*
AMD 7th A-Series APUs
- 2 x PCI Express 3.0 x16 Slots (single at x8 (PCIE2); dual at x8 (PCIE2) / x2 (PCIE4))*

*Supports NVMe SSD as boot disks
*If M2_1 is occupied, PCIE4 will be disabled.

[Onbusy]

Dang, that's what I was afraid of, hardware limitations.  I was searching for AMD CPU and couldn't find any threads, didn't think to search for the chipset.  Thanks for the reply.

[billhinge]

I notice most, if not all, people use the intel 1151 socket motherboard/CPU for building mining rigs.  Is there a reason people don't use the AMD boards?  Right now it's hard to find the intel boards, and they are more expensive.  Finding an AM4 socket board with 6 pcie slots and 2 M2 slots is cheap and easy.

Something like this:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157761

after mail in rebates, it's only $55.  6 pcie slots and 2 M.2 slots for a possible 8 GPUs.

Low end AM4 processors are out now too, with the Athlon x4 and APUs.

Just curious if they just plain don't work, or if people were just using the intel boards because they were cheap and easy to get ahold of at the time.

Know what you mean, but since I'm reasonably well off, curious and made a large profit to date I'm currently building a x399 threadripper 1950x rig with 3 vega fe. I only plan to use the 3 vega fe and threadripper to mine xmr etn etc. no plans for extra cards, hoping for circa 7000H/s, I get over 4000H/s now

I never had much luck with usb risers on intel boards so the fe are going in the x399 slots. currently running 2 fe in the x16 slots on intel board, 3rd fe not used

A curiosity I noticed is that the fe only uses half its ram on the intel board for mining, hope is that either now or in future I may get full use on a x399 board

Even if I only get similar results as intel board then I have a nice part time workstation/gaming machine as well

The intel board, i7 and 32gb can go on ebay 

[billhinge]

I notice most, if not all, people use the intel 1151 socket motherboard/CPU for building mining rigs.  Is there a reason people don't use the AMD boards?  Right now it's hard to find the intel boards, and they are more expensive.  Finding an AM4 socket board with 6 pcie slots and 2 M2 slots is cheap and easy.

Something like this:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157761

after mail in rebates, it's only $55.  6 pcie slots and 2 M.2 slots for a possible 8 GPUs.

Low end AM4 processors are out now too, with the Athlon x4 and APUs.

Just curious if they just plain don't work, or if people were just using the intel boards because they were cheap and easy to get ahold of at the time.

Know what you mean, but since I'm reasonably well off, curious and made a large profit to date I'm currently building a x399 threadripper 1950x rig with 3 vega fe. I only plan to use the 3 vega fe and threadripper to mine xmr etn etc. no plans for extra cards, hoping for circa 7000H/s, I get over 4000H/s now

I never had much luck with usb risers on intel boards so the fe are going in the x399 slots. currently running 2 fe in the x16 slots on intel board, 3rd fe not used

A curiosity I noticed is that the fe only uses half its ram on the intel board for mining, hope is that either now or in future I may get full use on a x399 board

Even if I only get similar results as intel board then I have a nice part time workstation/gaming machine as well

The intel board, i7 and 32gb can go on ebay 

Just got it working with 1 Vega and old vega 64 profile, hit the high 2200's before oscillating between 2000 and 2200, hmm a bit of tweaking next weekend I think.

[wacko]

Just got it working with 1 Vega and old vega 64 profile, hit the high 2200's before oscillating between 2000 and 2200, hmm a bit of tweaking next weekend I think.

Did you get the Frontier Edition? I've just read a post today from a guy that got a couple of these cards and people in that thread were saying how it's nearly impossible to get multiple FE Vega cards to mine at full speed in one rig. One card mines just fine, but when you add more their hashrate goes down. Curious whether you'll be able to find a workaround.

[billhinge]

Just got it working with 1 Vega and old vega 64 profile, hit the high 2200's before oscillating between 2000 and 2200, hmm a bit of tweaking next weekend I think.

Did you get the Frontier Edition? I've just read a post today from a guy that got a couple of these cards and people in that thread were saying how it's nearly impossible to get multiple FE Vega cards to mine at full speed in one rig. One card mines just fine, but when you add more their hashrate goes down. Curious whether you'll be able to find a workaround.

It is difficult because most research and tweaks are for the 64 so hard to know if they are optimal for FE.

On my intel board I could mine at 4050H/s with two cards all week, but they don't seem to like risers so I had them in the PCI slots

They run significantly quicker on this board at first but seem to slow after a while, got 2 in. (still using the slots for now)

Also I don't know the AMD mobo bios, haven't done the usual tweaking there yet

Unfortunately the only time I have to tweak is the weekend so this will have to wait till next week and get the cpu hashing as well

[Onbusy]

Nice.  Glad someone with the means is willing to play around with stuff like this.  I was doing more research after the initial reply, and the x370 chipset has 8 pcie lanes where the B350 only had 6.  X399 was too expensive to look at for me, but the x370 chipset may have some potential for mining.

I went ahead and bought an Asus Prime Z270-P and celeron processor since it's the most common and I'll be able to find the most support for it.  This will be the first Intel computer I've ever built, I've been AMD only for the last 20 years.

[billhinge]

My cpu is already watercooled and I'm adding open loop water cooling to the 3 vega FE's this weekend, hopefully temp shouldn't be an issue in the summer