Left Holding the bag.

The purchase of the large mining rig with the five graphics cards was a smart move, however, there were components in there that are really not useful for those that do not intend to do any mining, and the state of the crypto mining business indicates that a growing number of hobby miners are throwing in the towel and discarding their equipment, as quickly as possible.

I have already scrapped the large metal chassis that came with the unit, I could think of no circumstance where it would be useful, I removed the power supply, the industrial fans and the motherboard and took the case over to the local recyclers and threw it into the scrap metal skip, at least that part of the adventure is over.

We should discuss this motherboard :

There is an established order in the home computer building world, motherboards have been standardized over the last thirty years and fit into computer cases with a set pattern of screws and a backplane of outputs that use an IO plate within those cases. This mining motherboard has been created to ignore most of the established criteria, it is a niche monster and custom made to serve a single purpose, to run a mining operating system like HiveOS and support up to eight GPU units in the "riserless" PCIe x16 slots. The motherboard does not even have standard power requirements, hence a speciality unit is required to power it and all those power hungry graphics cards.

The Motherboard is a BTC65-V1.01 8x PCIe-16 and has 8 Fan Headers, 4GB RAM and a 64GB mSATA SSD with HiveOS installed. Left to right you can see the CMOS battery, then the mSATA solid state drive, chipset and the RAM socket and the CPU is under the heatsink, fan assembly in the middle. A normal ATX motherboard would be about 12 inches long, to fit in a desktop or tower case, this motherboard is 21.65 inches in length and of course, would only fit in a custom case (like the one I scrapped) and even though this is a "modern" motherboard, built in the last four years or so, the underlying technology for the CPU is well over a decade old.

I will not be too technical, because I just assemble computers, but the CPU is probably 2nd Generation Intel from back in the Sandy Bridge days, now I am not knocking that technology, I have a lot of respect for Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell processors, but the form factor of this mining board and the underlying technology mean that in "modern times" it has limited useful application. 

In that respect, for this piece of the mining chassis, I am left holding the bag on this motherboard, I have no use for it, it is highly unlikely I can sell it on marketplace and the only viable items are the mSATA solid state drive and the 4GB of RAM, which I may use in one of my industrial computers to create a home lab or a media server. 

I may attach the motherboard to my garage wall as a piece of artwork, it will serve to remind me that when the music stops there are always less chairs to sit on.