Gigabyte B250-FinTech Specifications reveals the possibility of installing up to 12 GPU for cryptocurrency mining. Today Gigabyte has broken the silence by officially announcing a motherboard explicitly designed motherboard for cryptocurrency miners, the B250-FinTech.
Gigabyte B250-FinTech allows 12 graphics cards
The vendors of motherboards have never avoided the mining madness. The last mining wave fed by Ethereum saw the release of base plates dedicated to this task, as did Asus and Biostar. But other older ones exist since the early days of Bitcoin. Gigabyte is joining that trend with the B250-FinTech. That is equipped with a total of 12 PCI-e slots, reinforced PCI-e power circuits, and other mining comforts.
Starting with the chipset specs, the B250 platform is the cheapest of Intel in the 200 series. It supports seventh generation (Kaby Lake) and sixth generation (Skylake) LGA 1151 CPUs with support for dual channel DDR4 memories, for which the B250-FinTech has four slots.
The form factor of the ATX motherboard of reduced width, which only has seven expansion slots, but Gigabyte has placed 11 PCI-e x1 slots along with a full-length PCI-e slot in a grid in the lower half of the card. Connecting the GPUs to the slots requires the use of flexible PCI-e extension cables. That is ideal for mining platforms, which are usually made to measure and do not have GPUs connected directly to the slots on the motherboard. The power supply in the PCI-e slots is reinforced by two Molex 12V connectors and four pins.
Gigabyte added to the B250-FinTech a series of useful accessories for the miners. The first is a 24-pin ATX PSU splitter cable. That allows the motherboard to boot up to three PSUs simultaneously. This is necessary because the 12 GPU power will probably require more than one power supply than the only one connected to the motherboard. The second useful addition is a small card that provides integrated power and reset switch for the motherboard.