Sub~$150 Motherboard w/3X PCIe x16 w/CORRECT Layout? Conspiracy?

[mysterylectricity]

Hey kids,

I can find plenty of motherboards in the sub~$100 range with 3X PCIe x16 slots.

The problem is, they all suffer from the same design defect.

They all have an x1 slot closest to the processor. The arrangement usually allows the first and third double-wide card to breath, but the middle card is usually right up against the third. Sometimes it's up against the first card, such that only the second and third cards have breathing room.

The correct layout would of course be:

x16 x x x16 x x x16

Then you could use an 8 slot case (not uncommon) with three cards and each would have an open slot on the fan side of the card.

I think I did find 1 or 2 MB's with the correct arrangement but they're all above $200.

WTF? It's not a board layout or real estate problem, some of the cheap boards clearly have room for an X16 near the processor.

Is this a marketing dept. conspiracy?

Does anyone know of an inexpensive board with the proper layout?

Thank you in advance!

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[nybbler905]

Nope on the price range, some people are putting shop class skilzz to the test making a form of slot riser/GPU separator so you will need the slot extenders to plug in the cards, have gaps between them and a classic desktop case look for huge size, almost nothing inside appeal.  Some people are out there selling a ' mounting kit ' that is just aluminum rails for doing just that, and the odd one pre-drills for the GPU bolts.

If you can work with wood, it's not hard to get a 2"x2" across the back of a case to raise all the cards and a second board to connect the cards to, you just can't use a ' standard ' case.  One thing I keep not seeing with these is a cheap eBay hard drive cooler fan or fans connected to a power supply across the ' front ' of what would be a case to help blow air in to the rig area.

Then again, there was one post where a miner uses Plastic Milk Crates and just stacks every thing in there and stacks the crates.

Hope this helps put some evil ideas in to your head how to work around ' design flaws ' or as Microsoft used to call them...

 " Features! " 

[skuser]

It's not market dept. conspiracy or design defect but the fact that probably 99.9% of market are customers who need to have cards as close as possible because they are not mining currencies but using the PCs for something else like gaming or graphical software where interconnected cards (via crossfire for example) are needed.
About 100 million desktop PCs are being sold per year, mining rigs would be less than 0.1% of that (judging just from current hashrate).

Anyway the best option would be buy the cheapest mobo and use risers, because your cards will get extremely hot when put inside standard desktop crate, regardless if they are 2 or 5cm apart...