Gigabyte launches its b250 mining motherboard

Gigabyte has broken the silence by officially announcing a motherboard designed specifically for cryptocurrency miners, the B250-FinTech.

Gigabyte B250-FinTech allows 12 graphics cards

Motherboard vendors have never avoided mining madness. The last mining wave fueled by Ethereum saw the release of motherboards dedicated to this task, as did Asus and Biostar, but there are older ones that have been around since Bitcoin's early days. Gigabyte is joining that trend with the B250-FinTech, which is equipped with a total of 12 PCI-e slots, ruggedized PCI-e power circuits, and other mining amenities.

Starting with the chipset, the B250 platform is Intel's cheapest in the 200 series. Supports seventh generation (Kaby Lake) and sixth generation (Skylake) LGA 1151 CPU with dual channel DDR4 memory support, for which the B250-FinTech has four slots.

The form factor of the narrow-width ATX motherboard, which typically only has seven expansion slots, but Gigabyte has placed 11 PCI-e x1 slots along with a full-length PCI-e slot on a rack in the lower half of the card. Connecting GPUs to slots requires the use of flexible PCI-e extension cables. This is ideal for mining rigs, which are normally custom made and do not have GPUs connected directly to the motherboard slots. The power supply in the PCI-e slots is enhanced by two 12V four-pin Molex connectors.

Gigabyte added a number of useful accessories for miners to the B250-FinTech. 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 12 GPU power will likely require more than one power supply than the only one connected to the motherboard. The second useful addition is a small card that provides a built-in power-on and reset switch for the motherboard.

At the moment we do not know its date of availability and price.

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