Some people think that the cryptocurrency bubble doesn’t have much life left in it and is about to burst. Others are a bit more optimistic and believe that Bitcoin and all the other digital currencies are here to stay. Hardware manufacturer Asus is apparently part of the second group judging by its latest product. The company unveiled a brand new motherboard earlier today that was specifically designed for mining cryptocurrencies.
Aptly named the H370 Mining Master, the motherboard is an improved version of the Asus B250 Mining Expert. Its predecessor was also designed for cryptocurrency mining and ended up selling a lot more units than anticipated. With this new iteration, Asus is going all out with the specs in an attempt to improve upon the B250 in every possible way. Based on what was revealed so far, it’s safe to say that the company managed to achieve that goal. And then some.
Key Features
The most impressive feature of the H370 Mining Master is its ability to support up to 20 GPUs. That number may seem a bit excessive but it’s worth keeping in mind that effective cryptocurrency mining requires a lot of power. Needless to say, you can’t fit that many graphics cards on a motherboard so don’t expect to simply slide them in via PCIe like you would with a regular PC. Instead, you need to connect the GPUs directly to the PCB via USB riser cables.
According to Asus, this approach will make it easier to diagnose potential problems. Blockchain aficionados can also expect reduced downtime and less need for maintenance. As an added benefit, there are fewer parts to worry about. The M370’s streamlined design allows miners to focus less on hardware management and more on the mining itself.
In addition to the hardware improvements, Asus also announced a specialized piece of software that will ship alongside the motherboard. The software is known as the GPU State Detection and does exactly what it says on the label. Miners can use State Detection to easily check the status of each graphics card. The software also automatically scans the system at launch and provides useful information regarding the riser ports. GPU State Detection makes it easy to see which ports are empty and which are not. The software also lets the user know if any ports are malfunctioning.
Price and Release Date
The Asus M370 Mining Master will launch in North America sometime in Q3 2018. The company is likely to reveal the specific release date next month at Computex 2018. The event takes place between June 5-9 in Taipei. Asus already confirmed that a custom mining rig featuring the motherboard will be present at the show.
The pricing is also being kept under wraps for now. But you can expect the M370 to probably end up costing somewhere around $400, possibly a bit more. Building and maintaining a powerful mining rig isn’t exactly cheap. So anything more than that will probably not be worth the investment.
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