You can never have too many ports. Or can you? It looks like someone got tired of hunting for one more USB port on their motherboard… and just crammed every possible spot full of them. This older Intel board (shown off on Reddit and spotted by VideoCardz) appears to be heavily customized and sporting no less than 36 USB-A ports on its rear.
Said motherboard is based on what appears to be an LGA-1151 design from 10 or so years ago. The ports are spread across four stacks of eight, plus an extra four up top crammed under an Ethernet port and an old-fashioned PS/2 input. With all that mashed into a standard ATX form factor, there’s still room for an HDMI port, three audio jacks, and one lonely little PCIe card, though it needs to be a single slot. The rest of the PCIe lanes seem entirely devoted to USB.
I can’t help but wonder what the purpose of this thing is. I’m seeing just two RAM DIMM slots, and with that restrictive PCIe expansion this wouldn’t be fit for a powerhouse build. A few Reddit commenters are guessing that this hardware has been customized for cryptocurrency mining, with a central PC controlling huge banks of tiny and efficient ASIC mining gadgets with one x1 PCIe lane sent through each USB port.
You can search for “USB mining rig” if you want more details on that kind of hardware. Frankly, I don’t want to link to any of them here as I don’t want to be held responsible for infecting my readers’ PCs with some nasty stuff. Others are guessing that it’s designed to control phone hardware in scam call centers.
I don’t have the engineering or computer science knowledge to make that call. But still, I bet there’s someone out there who can build a regular desktop PC—for non-nefarious purposes—and fill up every single one of those ports with various accessories, storage drives, and desktop gadgets… and I would love to meet that person. I wonder how many widgets you’d need to plug in before the motherboard simply couldn’t supply the electrical power to all of them.
