Topic: Best budget 6GPU motherboard? (Read 654 times)

Scooped up a new ASUS Z390-P for $99 and an Intel G5400 off Ebay brand new for $50. I don't feel like either was a bad deal. ASUS Z390-P has a really nice BIOS, and setting up was very easy, plug-and-play (less some BIOS optimization). Running with 6 RX 580 8gb cards.

do you buy them from aliexpress? what is the price for such a set?

You rose this thread from the dead. 2017.

I will try to give you a good answer. This answer is for a mining board running an os like

 simple mining os or hive os.

The onda d1800 board is a good board it comes from china new I order sets of 9 of them.

fixed slot boards. I try to run 3 cards in every other slot and use a season focus 850 watt psu. and 1 stick of 8gb sodimm samsung ram.

no need to get a cpu it comes installed.

I get 9 boards sent to my home in the USA from china in about 43 days I pay with visa.

how do you manage to build cpu+mobo mining setup nowdays? I cant find any old intel CPU-s that can pair with ga-h110-d3a, tb250-btc etc...and there is no new 300 series chipset mining mobos out there, only ASUS H370 Mining Master which is expencive and biostar TB360-BTC PRO which i cand find... any solution?

Whatever's cheapest works. Generally this tends to be biostar or ASRock boards, TB85 or Pro BTC. Haswell chips have gotten more expensive in the recent months, even the dual core Celeron and Pentium chips, but they're still the standard for mining.

I ended up going with the ASRock H81 PRO BTC R2.0 (125 CAD)

Nothing wrong with using linux as the OS of your mining rig.  Though, I might interject... with you having lots of enterprise experience, you know this is not the early days of Windows.  The modern windows kernels are just as stable as linux.  Where linux shines more is in the handling of bad conditions, like poorly coded software and drivers.

The point I'm trying to make is you shouldn't be scared off by using either one.  They both have their good and bad points.  Use what's comfortable to you.



ROI is king in mining.  You are investing a lot of money to offset gains you could have had by just buying a coin.  Where mining has an additional bonus is that the hardware retains some value that you can exchange either for better equipment or cash/coins.

I have a TB250 running six 1080tis with no problem.  No fires.  LOL!  Most likely an idiot who doesn't know how to build a computer.

Where do you guys get your information?  User reviews are not the gospel... just a guide.

Thanks for the detailed reply. Not to get further off topic.... But one thing I forgot to mention was from all the research thus far, seems like Linux is the more stable option once you get into 8+ GPUs (Though I've heard Windows 10 has an easier time of recognizing more than 8 GPUs with recent driver updates). Overall though, Linux is more stable than Windows. That's fine, also been using Linux since the 1.1 stable / 1.3 beta kernel days . I personally prefer Ubuntu LTS versions since they typically have 5+ years of support and updates. For anyone shying away from Linux if the have no experience, a paid distro like EthOS would probably take a lot of the guess work (and fun) out of using Linux... As you said, this is a hobby so you may want to try a regular Linux distro like Ubuntu and download / install and sometimes compile the packages yourself for the experience.

Thanks for also bringing up ROI (something I'm thinking about in the back of my head, but failed to mention as a newbie). Enterprise grade stuff would be wonderful but if it suddenly makes your ROI 1.5 years instead of 180 days, that isn't nearly as good of an investment. The veterans here give good advice, make it good enough that you're not going to have to babysit the rig constantly, while at the same time ensuring you get the best prices possible in order to have an acceptable ROI period on your investment. I've found whattomine.com to be a very good source to calculate ROI and revenue in general. They seem to have the hashrates of the more common GPUs against each of the common crypto algorithms stored in their database. All I needed to do was select my GPU model and how many will be in my rig and it will calculate the daily profit and the best cryptocurrency to mine at the moment. Just remember that the numbers spit out by many profit calculators don't always factor in things that can change profit over the longer term such as difficulty changes, overall network hashing capacity, etc... so take the numbers with a grain of salt.

I bought it on Ebay 6 gpu, dddr3, but the only drawback is that he's on LGA 1150, and there are processors expensive

Promised myself i wouldn't spend any more money after this rig lol. I have 4 cards ready/waiting and buying 2 more is the most i want to spend (also don't want to buy another PSU) right now.. or ever again

The suggestions people mentioned are great, I personally would recommend the BIOSTAR TB250s as well since i've been using them flawlessly in 2 of my rigs months now. However, i'd also like to ask why you are limiting yourself to a 6-GPU motherboard when it would be much more efficient to build a rig on as 12-GPU or even a 19-GPU motherboard? Just some food for thought.

You are really over-thinking this. In reality, any motherboard with PCI-E v1.1 slots and up will work. Prior to this year I was mining on a Dell XPS 700 with PCI-E v1.1 solts from 2007. It worked flawless with up to four cards and I still use it as a test bench. What matters is you want a motherboard that is known to support the number of cards you want for the rig, without giving you tons of grief and it fits your budget. In that respect, the ASRock H81 Pro BTC, Biostar TB85 and TB250 are among the best known choices you can make for a good 6-7 card mining rig OOBE . There are thousands of these motherboards currently in use as can be seen on the ethOS motherboard stats page.

http://ethosdistro.com/versions

I have a Biostar TB85 and it's been flawless with up to 7 cards, including mixing AMD and Nvidia cards. I also have a 13 card AMD rig on the ASRock H110 Pro BTC+ and it's been rock solid as well. The PCI-E slots being too close together is a dumb design flaw, but it's nothing that can't be easily solved by wrapping the riser x1 connector with two pieces of electrical tape on the back. The ASRock H110 Pro BTC+ also gets my vote as the best mining motherboard currently in production as the Asus B250 mining expert motherboard  is neutered by design in requiring you to have a minimum of 6 P106 mining cards if you want to run over 13 cards.

Not bad. If you want a motherboard that fits your budget.

I would also vote for the H81 BTC R2.0.
It is rocksolid - setting it up was easy and the miner runs for weeks without any issues. It's also the cheapest MB in my collection but it has no M2 Slot and also the old CPU socket but its not that relevant for mining only.

I have considered those. I just have no idea if one of those and whichever cheap board i grab would work though so its a gamble. I also hear they dont work well with Nvidia cards.. No idea if that is true.

EDIT: The tb250 is the one many people on Newegg say starts fires lol

i actually found that those pcie-usb expansion cards (that provide 4 USB slots out of an pcie slot) function just fine - I found an old motherboard which has 3 pcie slots, added this 15$ pcie card and it works stable for a couple months
so maybe you could go even cheaper

it doesn't work on all motherboards, on some of them it's only able to detect additional 3 cards, and wouldn't boot otherwise

but that's if you're really doing a poor man's variant - I would still suggest biostar tb250 or h81 btc pro
if you're into mining, stay away from budget components, this is your money maker, should have only quality components

http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews

Not to drag this thread too far off-topic, but in general, those brand names don't mean much. What really matters is underlying OEM responsible for the guts of the power supplies in question. Most of the low-mid range Corsair units are done by Channel Well, which has only recently started gaining an "okay" reputation in the PSU area. Many of EVGA's lower-end units are done by HEC, which is in about the same tier as CWT.

The upper-end lines are usually handled by better OEMs, such as Seasonic or SuperFlower.
FSP is another reputable one to note.



Also, while it is subjective, I would agree that system stability should be prioritized. At the very least, I'd like my rigs to run for 2-3 months before I power them down to clear the dust buildup and whatnot.

Of course, when it comes down to it, the reliability of individual components tends to be skewed by the silicon lottery. Going by reviews and past experiences with certain brands & products only gets you so far.

Thanks guys

Just a hobby but its not like i enjoy a rig that crashes a few times a day heh. That GB board was my first choice for a cheap board as GB has never let me down. It is out of stock everywhere though.

I have never been in a position of even consider a Biostar board. But im thinking about every dollar for ROI. Reading the reviews for the newer/updated version of the Biostar board. Lots of people talk about how much it sucks and more than a few talk about fires. I have never heard/read anything bad about the older model (the one i will probably buy) but it scares me. heh