MSI H310-F PRO Coffee Lake Motherboard For Cryptocurrency Miners Leaks Ahead Of Schedule

Cryptocurrency mining is a phenomenon that many gamers and even some cities are having issues with. Gamers aren't happy because the miners are buying up all the graphics cards out there and making them hard to find and driving prices up. Some cities aren't happy because the miners are slurping up vast amounts of electricity and raising the rates for everyone in the town, this is exactly what happened in a small New York town recently. That said, for those that are willing to make an effort, even if on part time basis, re-purposing your gaming system can be a worthwhile and profitable effort, so long as cryptocurrency values hold up to recent volatility. 

Perhaps another answer to some of issues of hardware availability, are cards and other hardware that are specifically built for the crypto miners. We already have some graphics cards just for miners, such as the recently announced BITNAND mining optimized GTX 1060 that sells for $389. Now apparently, MSI has a new motherboard that has leaked, and it's aiming directly at miners, called the MSI H310-F Pro.

The board is designed specifically for Intel's Coffee Lake CPUs with an LGA1151 socket onboard. The H310-F Pro is said to be the very first mining mainboard specifically for Coffee Lake CPUs. The big deal with this mainboard is that the beast can handle 13 graphics cards at once. There are 12 PCIe x1 slots and a single full-size PCIe x16 slot waiting for all the cards miners want to cram into them. The board also has additional Molex connectors for more GPU power; if you load down this thing with 12 cards you will certainly need more power.

On the RAM front, there are two DDR4 DIMMs and there are four fan connectors to keep the machine cool. The board does have space for five more PCIe x1 slots, but the chipset is the limitation here. Presumably when B360-based boards roll out, those extra PCIe x1 slots will be utilized.