These days it’s nice to find even one graphics card at MSRP, let alone enough of them to occupy Colorful’s new mining motherboard with its eight PCIe slots. Come on miners, leave some for the rest of us.
Looking for a new graphics card, or maybe eight? Here’s our pick of the best graphics cards.
Chinese company Colorful love to think outside the box. Whether their ideas are always necessary is another thing, but you can’t help but marvel at their PC built to look like a mini-gun-wielding jeep. While many companies see miners as a point of contention within the gaming community right now, they are also a large, and speedily growing, market. Colorful are hoping to jump on the wagon for the next gold rush with the C.B250A-BTC PLUS V20. Catchy…
The C.B250 PLUS is a motherboard of extreme proportions, so much in fact that it abides by no standardised form factor currently in existence. The board measures a whopping 485 x 195 mm and will not fit in any standard size cases. The reason for ridiculous length is that Colorful wanted as many PCIe slots on the board as possible, so that miners could say goodbye to riser cards and still manage to fit dual-slot graphics cards onto the board directly. Whether Colorful’s more outlandish home-grown graphics cards will fit back-to-back is another thing altogether. With a single 16x gen 3.0 PCIe slot, and another seven x1 gen 3.0 slots, Colorful have included 16 PCIe power connectors to make sure every graphics card gets enough juice, as the board lacks the usual 24-pin ATX power connector.
The C.B250 PLUS motherboard features an LGA-1151 socket, so Skylake and Kaby Lake will be required. For cryptocurrency mining, these CPUs will offer more than enough brain power. Only a single DDR4 SO-DIMM slot is included on the C.B250 PLUS, as cryptocurrency mining is not particularly system memory dependent. With only one SATA connector, MSATA, onboard 1000M LAN, and limited USB support, the C.B250 PLUS is the bare minimum required for a successful mining rig.
The Republic of China have been cracking down on cryptocurrency in recent months, even though some of the largest mining facilities are based within their borders. China-based Colorful are seemingly unfazed by the crackdown in their native market with the release of their latest mining board, betting on cryptocurrency to continue as a booming market despite traders selling off Bitcoin fast in response.
If you were so inclined to help out the human race in curing diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s and various viruses, rather than running a mining rig for profit, you could instead utilise this board to become a powerful Folding@Home machine.
The C.B250 PLUS isn’t Colorful’s first venture into the cryptocurrency mining platform, with the C.H81A-BTC V20 and C.B250A-BTC V20 also offering multi-GPU support in a more compact form factor, although these will require riser cards for multiple dual-slot graphics cards.
With cryptocurrency mining expected to only expand further, more manufacturers will be tailoring their product lines to accommodate this growing market, or more specifically, the miners’ deep pockets.