ASRock is jumping on the bitcoin bandwagon with the unveiling of two new motherboards it says are designed for mining the increasingly popular virtual currency.The company is hoping to help customers make some cash with the H81 Pro BTC and H61 Pro BTC, both of which feature a total of six PCIe slots and two extra 4 pin power connectors for extra mining power.The H81 Pro BTC packs five PCIe 2.0 x1 slots and one PCIe 3.0 x16 slot and supports Intel's 4th generation of Core i-series as well as Xeon, Pentium, and Celeron in LGA1150 packages.There's also dual channel DDR 3 1600, dual VGA output (D-Sub, HDMI), Realtek Gigabit LAN, 5.2 CH HD Audio (RealTek ALC662 Audio Codec), two SATA3, two SATA2, two USB 3.0, and six USB 2.0 (four up front, two in the back).There's also support for A-Tuning, XFast LAN, XFast RAM, Easy Driver Installer, FAN-Tastic Tuning, and USB Key.The H61 is for second and third generation Intel Core i-series, Xeon, Pentium and Celeron in LGA1155 packages.It also has five PCIe 2.0 x1 slots and one PCIe 3.0 x16 slot as well as dual channel DDR2 1600, dual VGA out (D-Sub and HDMI), Realtek Gigabit LAN, 5.1 CH HD Audio (VIA VT1705 Audio Codec), four SATA2, ten USB 2.0 (four up front, six in the back), and supports XFast 555, Dehumidifier, OMG, Fast, and Restart to UEFI.

Of course, the chance that you'll earn a significant amount of money mining bitcoin alone is small, whether you have one of these boards or not.Mining bitcoin is resource-intensive and is designed to make new currency available at a slow and steady rate.Though using GPU power to mine is faster than using CPU power, as more people start mining, it's become less rewarding.As such, your best bet is still to join a bitcoin mining pool (a group of other miners), and share the load as well as the acquired wealth.Follow Jane McEntegart @JaneMcEntegart.Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.ASRock has shown off its new H110 Pro BTC+ motherboard at Computex 2017.The ASRock H110 Pro BTC+ motherboard boasts 13 PCIe slots and is aimed at cryptocurrency miners.With support for up to 13 graphics cards, the H110 Pro BTC+ is the perfect motherboard for systems built to mine cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, Ethereum, LiteCoin, and ZCash.The motherboard uses the LGA 1151 socket which supports Intel 6th-gen and 7th-gen processors, and includes an M.2 slot for SSD storage.

The company also launched two Mini-ITX gaming motherboards for Intel’s X299 Chipset and AMD’s AM4 platform.ASRock has not revealed the price of its H110 Pro BTC+ motherboard, but said it will launch soon.Now read: MSI shows off new PC hardware at Computex 2017 Share Share Latest news Partner Contentethereum bad investmentLooking for a new motherboard?bitcoin blockchain formatWhy not pick up one that could potentially pay for itself, like the new Bitcoin mining mainboards from ASRock?litecoin safeThe H61 Pro BTC and H81 Pro BTC both feature a whopping six PCI express slots.bitcoin difficulty 2014They’re not all the kind that are made for gaming, either.bitcoin horror stories

There’s just one PCIe 3.0 x16 slot in the bunch, and the others are all PCIe 2.0 x1 slots.You’re not going to use them to set up an epic twelve-monitor desktop, but x1 slots are fine for handing off computing chores to the additional GPUs you can pop in.The question really isn’t whether or not all these slots are useful — it’s whether or not ASRock’s Bitcoin motherboards actually make any sense at all.bitcoin saint petersburg bowlBitcoin mining at home can be an expensive proposition, especially in places where electricity rates are steep.When you’re mining using a half-dozen powerful video cards to crunch the numbers, you’ll be sucking down plenty of juice.Depending on how much power your new cards are drawing, you could actually end up losing money.The real kicker, of course, is the up-front cost to populate all those slots on these new boards.Six AMD Radeon 7970 cards are going to run you around $2,000.

Although that’d yield somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,300Mhas/s, it could take ages to even come close to paying off the bill for those cards and your insane new motherboard.Compare that cost to a more energy-efficient ASIC setup from a company like Avalon.A $3,300 standalone ASIC miner can get you around 140 Ghash/s, and that’s a massive upgrade.Is there any point in buying an ASRock Bitcoin motherboard for the sole purpose of mining?You’d be better off with a dedicated gaming system and an ASIC-based mining rig.Kudos to ASRock for trying, though.They’ve never been afraid to release odd mainboard configurations in the past, and it’s nice to see that they’re still willing to take risks — even if it doesn’t always make sense.ASRock announces Bitcoin-mining motherboards November 18, 2013 // 9:51 a.m.ASRock has announced the world's first motherboard designed specifically for mining the crypto-currency Bitcoin - at a time when the peak benefit of GPU-based mining has long since passed.

Proposed by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto back in 2008, Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network-based currency which uses a one-way hashing function to validate transactions.Payment processing is carried out by volunteer systems, which expend computational power to create and validate the hashes that power the system - and, in doing so, unlock new Bitcoins, earning money and keeping the currency growing.That growth has, in recent months, exploded.When first introduced, entrepreneurs soon saw a money-making opportunity in selling the generated Bitcoins for real-world currency - giving those whose computers aren't fast enough to unlock Bitcoins themselves the opportunity to give the system a try.While Bitcoins originally sold at around $0.02 each, today's exchange rate sees a single Bitcoin sit an at average of around $545 - down from its peak yesterday at $618.While it's still possible for users to generate Bitcoins themselves by generating and validating the hashes, a process known as mining, it's not easy: as the computational power of the Bitcoin network increases, the difficulty of validating a block and receiving a Bitcoin reward also increases.

Currently, that difficulty sits at a value of 609 million - meaning the days of individuals mining Bitcoins alone have long since vanished, with teams partnering up in mining pools and sharing the resultant payouts accordingly.The growing increase in difficulty has another knock-on effect: the amount of computational power required to make any real money at Bitcoin mining is increasing exponentially.In its early days, the first Bitcoins miners used their computers processors to generate a few hundred thousand hashes a second.This was followed by GPU-based mining, giving access to performance of up to a few hundred million hashes; now, the profits go to designers of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) designed purely for Bitcoin mining, which can generate hundreds of billions of hashes every second at a fraction of the power draw required by a GPU.It's in this market that ASRock has decided to launch a pair of motherboards designed specifically for GPU-based Bitcoin mining.Dubbed the H61 Pro BTC and H81 Pro BTC respectively, the two boards feature six PCI Express slots - one x16 and five x1 - and additional four-pin power connectors on the board to support up to six high-performance graphics cards.