Hello all,
About a month ago I built my first 6x 480 rig with an ASRock H97 Anniversary and everything works great. I only wish I had purchased more motherboards at that time, because they were selling for around $80 each.
Now I can't seem to find these boards anywhere for a reasonable price. Newegg Canada shows them as discontinued. Newegg US shows the price at $299 USD. Similar outrageous pricing on Amazon.
After a week of scouring the Internet and local classifieds, I've almost given up hope. Does anyone know of a good source for these boards?
Please feel free to list all alternative motherboards that you've personally had success with.
Happy Mining!
P.S. ASRock H81 BTC Pro is also sold out/discontinued.
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Incidentally, I put up a sale of R9 390 and/or r7 370 for a decent price WITH new H97 at $75-80 and no one ever bid here and on btctalk.
Now, I am not selling H97, f that.
@Truthchanter I was wondering the same thing about that molex plug for the PCIE slots. When I connected all 6 gpus, the rig wouldn't boot unless I plugged in that molex. And I'm also using powered USB risers.
@mikeminer The biostar h81s2 is unavailable on Newegg. If the molex plug is indeed unnecessary, then I might try the MSI Z97 Gaming 5 and see if I can get 6 or 7 cards running on it.
@Calivet The biostar tb85 looks good, but is also unavailable on Newegg. I'll keep looking.
Nowadays i would probably keep opting for the mobos with the molex plug just for any potential increase in stability, especially when people are saying that the sata to molex adapters may not be safe to power the risers for 480s/470s... actually i found a burnt/melted sata to molex adaptor for my powered riser yesterday and it was only powering 1 gpu for that string! so they are iffy anyway
From MSI, there is also this board, the Z170-A Pro. I read a lot of posts that complain about the MSI cards' stability and setup issues, so I'm wary of them. However I don't have personal experience and I could be wrong.
Asrock do make a 6-card board: the Fatal1ty Gaming Killer Z97X. It's pretty flashy for a mining rig, but right now appears (from my perspective) to be one of the best options out there. It's $144 at Newegg, which is double what I paid for my H81 BTC Pros. But it should be easier to resell - I would imagine it's more appealing to gamers. And, I like that fact that it's an Asrock - I would hope it would be similar to the H81 and H97 in stability and setup.
There are some Asus and Gigabyte that support 5+ GPUs. The Gigabytes aren't really 6 gpu boards - if you consume that PCI/e 2x slot, it knocks out the 1x slots. So they are actually 5-gpu boards even though they have 7 PCI/e slots.
Are you on Win 10 right now? I know that you used Ubuntu before according to prior posts.
I have NO restarts (meaning less than 1/two weeks) on Ubuntu 14.04 with 3XX cards and no restarts on 16.04 with RX 470 MSI card(s) when on H97 ann.
However, H97 Ann with Win 10 and Sapphire RX 470 (OC, 4gb and 8gb) cards is restarting every 24-48 at random. Default bioses. About to do modding.
EDIT: Ok, maybe this thing called the "hi-fi"? Perhaps that's it - it was not clearly a Biostar board to me. https://aliexpress.com/item/Hi-Fi-H81S2-MOTHERBOARD-1150-H81-SATA-6Gb-s-USB-3-0-MATX-Test-Ok/32321180474.html?spm=2114.01010208.3.34.9Oxniu&ws_ab_test=searchweb201556_0,searchweb201602_4_10057_10056_10065_10068_10055_10067_10054_10069_301_10059_10058_10032_418_10073_10017_10070_10060_10061_10052_10062_10053_10050_10051,searchweb201603_4&btsid=217aa322-cccc-413f-b0ab-3604634be62b
https://msi.com/Motherboard/Z97-GUARD-PRO.html#hero-overview
thats the cheapest mobo i find capable of 6 cards in my country. i need to replace my dead h81 pro