ASrock has announced motherboards claimed to be the first designed for Bitcoin mining
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer digital currency which uses a one way hashing function to validate transactions. In recent months, Bitcoin is gaining more and more popularity and growth all over the world. Germany recognises Bitcoin as a legal tender and there’s also a new Bitcoin ATM installed in Canada.
Bitcoins started selling at $0.02 a piece and at today’s exchange rate, a single Bitcoin is valued at around $545. In 2009, a Norwegian man who invested $27 in Bitcoin sees the value inflated to $886,000.
Every Bitcoin transaction is carried out by volunteer systems to create and validate hashes, which in turn will be awarded with new Bitcoins. The process of obtaining these digital currency through computing is known as Bitcoin mining. One of the first Bitcoin miners utilize their computer processors to generate few hundred thousand of hashes each second. However, the amount of time and processing power needed to mine new Bitcoins increases with each new one that is mined.
Bitcoin miners switched to GPU-based mining which can deliver up to a few hundred million hashes. This was followed by application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) designed specifically for Bitcoin mining, generating hundreds of billions of hashes each second and also draws less power than that required by a GPU-based machine.
Now, the Taiwan based ASrock has announced two new motherboards designed specifically for GPU-based mining of the digital currency – H61 Pro BTC and H81 Pro BTC. It boasts a total of six PCI Express slots to power up to six graphics cards simultaneously, plus two extra 4 pin connectors for extra mining power.
“The abundant onboard PCIe slots guarantee fast GPU mining, while the additional power connectors provide advanced system stability while mining,” said ASrock. It may sound very promising, however, in a time where ASICs can offer a far higher performance with a lower power draw, ASrock motherboards seems to be arriving a bit late. There have been no pricing yet for both of these motherboards nor a release date.
