I have two of these boards, I run 13 GTX 1070's on one and 9 on the other. I use i3 processors and 1000W FSP Aurum PSUs, plus SATA powered risers. My findings:
- Must enable CSM in bios in order to detect the SSD/HDD and boot up.
- will not start with 2 DDR4 modules (corsair vengeance 8gb at 2400 MHz each), in fact not only it won't start it behaves as if something shorted and won't start up sooner than 30 mins after pulling out the 2nd module
- will not start with more than 13 video cards plugged in no matter what. cards and risers powered from the PCIe PSU cables ofc.
- Asus customer support is a f****ing sad joke, the most interesting "reply" I got was to RTFM along with 3 screens of canned garbage and disclaimers that took them a week to send.
- online manuals are useless, possibly compiled in india or paki or something, even a 15 year old's common sense does a better job at solving issues.
- PCIe 1x connectors are low quality and poorly soldered to the board, didn't see a manufacturer such as asus building a heavy duty niche board without paying more attention to these "details".
- board has no power button, annoying.
- couldn't get wake on LAN to work yet, possibly bios issue.
- board price should have been $160 or so but often retails at $400 or so, that's another bad joke and definitely not worth buying at $400.
The rigs are somewhat difficult to manage due to lack of space that quickly becomes a problem with so many GPUs. So you will probably want to build a custom chassis for this toy and use PCIe extenders, longer riser cables (the 60 cm version), possibly forget about plugging the PSUs in the mobo ATX connectors and do a bypass that will also allow you to use multiple 650W PSUs that are more cost efficient if you throw in some PCIe splitters, just be careful with the amps.
https://howchoo.com/g/nmu4mtjjnzq/how-to-diagnose-a-psu-without-any-toolsOnce these annoying gimmicks are out of the way it all runs smooth and stable at some 32-33Mh/s with ETH per card (zotac and KFA2 cards)
But I will not buy more unless they fix the 13 GPU "limit" or bug or whatever it is...because the component cost saving promise turns into wasted time managing difficult rigs and guessing fixes for various snags.
cheerios