Octominer B8 Plus Motherboard: Review / Builds / Troubleshooting

Today I want to write about a piece of equipment I got a lot of content for my channel out: The Octominer B8 Plus Motherboard. This is a mining board with 8 PCIE slots, with which you can build a riserless mining rig for 8 GPUs. What's important for me to tell you that neither the videos nor this blog post are sponsored. I bought all the parts of my own mined coin for my channel and to expand my small mining farm further.

I want to divide this into 3 Parts:

1. The Motherboard itself
2. Building with the board
3. Troubleshooting

1. The Motherboard
   The first video on the board on my channel only featured the board itself. An initial review so to say. We check basics, as for example the CPU (hazardous blue plastic detected!) and proceed to install some necessities like RAM and the mSata drive. Ordering and shipping in general went well - everything arrived safely and as promised.
   
   1. Building with the Octominer
      Thanks to some missing parts, I actually got 2 build videos out of the Octominer. I decided to go for a mixed nVidia rig. My cards are:
      2 x 1080
      1 x 1070TI
      4 x 1060 - 6GB
      1 x 1050TI
      
      So let's talk about the first build first. It was an 4 card ultra low power rig, because a bigger breakout board for my HP server power supply was still missing. So in the first video, I built only with 4 cards, but it was a good chance to get more experiences with the board. As you can see in the video, I also bought the server style case from Octominer and was building in it. I had to remove the intake fans because cards like the Asus ROG 1060 would have been to big otherwise! Here is build video one:
      I was already glad for the experiences, because I found out some things for myself, f.e. that I want to build the Octominer in an upright position, because it's easier like that in my little farm. Some time after the first video with only 4 cards, finally all the other parts missing came in and I could continue building - so next up was the full build out to 8 cards.

      Here is where I ran into problems with the board for the first time. I normally use Win10 (now switched to HiveOS) for mining, so I got some problems with unrecognized cards, when I went from 4 to 8 GPUs, but more on that below, because I went through such an extensive trouble shooting process that I wanted to make a separate video about it. So first the full 8 card build:

      
      Benchmarks for algos like Equihash or SHA3 can be found in the respective videos, but a rig like this is also very suitable for algorithms like NeoScrypt or Lyra2Rev2 (f.e. 250 mh/s on Lyra2R2)
      So let's also talk about the problems. Win 10 really did not like card 5 - 8 (or later just the 8th card) and I just could not get it to run with all cards.. there are many recommendations out there, even by Octominer themselves and I tried ALL OF THEM. After a crazy afternoon I finally found the solution. So if you have this very specific problems (or generally unrecognised GPUs in Windows) CLICK HERE for the Trouble Shooting video, because I didn't want that people with similar problems have to watch the whole build videos in order to find help.
      
      Lastly, because I spammed you with a lot of my videos, I want to share a more general video of mine in which I present the current state of my farm, what machines are running and what is coming up for the channel! Thanks for reading and have a nice week!