No graphics output. And so loud you wouldn’t be able to hear your game either. Also they use about 1kw of power, so you’d only want to run it in the winter.
You are _not_ getting one of these for less than $300, and because of this post and many like it, there are countless scams selling just cases for them at this price from a dollar or two of filament.
If it's advertised as a case and it works, why is it a scam? I don't own a 3D printer, nor do I know anyone who does. If someone is designing, printing, and selling a useful product, why is that a scam?
I think they are saying people mislead customers into thinking they are getting a "$60 gaming pc" when they are actually just getting a 3d printed case with nothing inside.
Automatically no 3d printed case is worth $300 because it's not possible to make it good enough quality.
A metal and wood case could be worth $300.
A good design is worth something, and a good printing job is worth something, and the convenience of a service is worth something, but no amount of good design and quality printing job and service convenience can make a 3d printed case worth more than about $50 before shipping, and it would need to be somehow pretty special design to overcome some basic material and process weaknesses and still be functional and look good to be worth that much.
$300 is too high, but $50 is too low. 3D print sellers aren't doing injection molded parts at scale, nor offshoring the labor. For GP's linked case file; between the filament, the compatible linked switch and fan hardware not purchased by the thousands, and someone paying themself at least minimum wage to print all 46 individual parts and then to partially assemble and package it up nicely (and not counting printer hardware depreciation or electricity), $50 for it is not a viable product to sell or to run as a business. That's the price I would budget for making it myself with the 3D printer I already own and not counting my time as a cost, not something I would waste my time with selling.
Because the sellers are categorizing them as computers on ebay and filling in all of the appropriate specifications as if it was the computer, and only putting in the description "CASE ONLY, DOES NOT INCLUDE ANY COMPUTER PARTS".
If you are selling a product for way more than it should cost (like a $60 3D printed case), when that cost is the exact price that a popular blog says the computer costs, you are intentionally hoping to prey on people mistaking your listing for the actual computer.
You can make all sorts of arguments about possible reasons for charging that exact price for that exact product, but no reasonable person is going to buy that.
This always makes me ambivalent about enthusiast blog posts. Like on the one hand, cool that the knowledge gets spread. On the other hand, whenever one gets popular, another hidden gem skyrockets in price or becomes semi-permanently low in stock.
I built one of these. It is not possible to do so for 60$ anymore since the board itself goes for 150+. On top of that you still need a PSU, NVMe, a high pressure fan, DP to HDMI adapter, possibly BT and Wifi adapters, and a 3d-printed or DIY case.
It is also a very hacky build. You need to flash the BIOS which enables a few interesting unlocks: from 24 to 40 GPU compute units and 6 to 8 CPU cores. It's a bit of a silicon lottery and will depend on your specific board and you need to test everything thoroughly yourself, honing on a config that works for you.
The software side of things is Linux, so if you're familiar with setting it up it shouldn't be difficult to go through the different steps. There are a few distros that work well. I use Bazzite and boot directly to Steam big picture, the UX is great. You can exit to desktop and you have a fully usable Linux box that you can play around with from the comfort of your sofa.
One of the downsides is that it uses a lot of power when idling, about 80W. I just turn it off after using it. I'm working on a QOL feature: an ESP32-based power switch that starts the board when a specific BT device is detected (usually a controller). Once everything is setup the board works very nicely. It can be a bit loud depending on your fan/case combination. I'm currently printing this one[0]
It delivers about the same punch as a standard PS5. The hardware is remarkably similar, and much better than mini PCs set up with AMD APUs, unless you go Strix halo but that is another price league (10x). You can play Cyberpunk 2077 decently on it on settings similar to an AMD RX 6700XT.
A pretty impressive number is the memory bandwidth at ~410 GB/s, which should run local LLMs like Gemma 4 or Qwen3.8 27B at decent speed but with limited context size as its just 16Gb
Would I build it again? It was a lot of fun, but financially is not a crazy deal if you need to buy all the materials and factor your time in. Still much cheaper than a Steam Box!
Was it possible to build it for $60 when you built it though?
As for the idle dray, a lot of PC's have Wake On Lan so you can power it on via a special IP packet. I could't get it to work on mine, so i pus an esp32 based power monitoring plug in front of it, and configured the PC to power on directly when powered. When the power monitoring sees the PC sleeping for some time, it cuts the power. I control the plug via home assistant, so i can switch it on remotely
In my particular case the HDMI goes directly into a sound bar which does not have a DP input. I assume most people building a box like this will connect it to a TV, which is most commonly HDMI-only. So technically not a strong requirement but practically almost
Not sure why you got downvoted for this - all but the cheapest monitors include DisplayPort because DisplayPort is both technically superior to HDMI and royalty-free.
The only thing HDMI really has going for it TV's/home theater equipment. (And that's partially because most of the manufacturers are part of the HDMI forum, so they're the ones receiving the royalties that everyone else pays to use HDMI.)
I got one for $130 ~8-10 weeks ago. Whew. Lucky. The Steam Machine I think is part of why these things are now suddenly super in demand but also, yeah, it was a riotously good deal for a long time; thank you for this one good thing crypto.
Just to note there are already over a half dozen esp32 based power controllers. The BT detect is cool. Reddit is at the "Yet Another esp32 controller" phase, has been for a while. (I'm not sure if yours is the first or not to do that, I think I've seen similar but maybe it was just yours I saw.) Bless you esp32. Thank you for actually having the obvious good thing, wireless, available for the world (and why did no one else deign do so?)! https://www.reddit.com/r/BC250Gaming/comments/1uylmj0/yet_an...
It was all the rage towards getting 4K 120 Hz VRR on Linux before AMD came along to contribute proper HDMI 2.1 support to the kernel. There is also mention in that thread of a CableMatters adapter that could be flashed with an alternate firmware but it wasn't as stable.
I don’t see how you could run Qwen3.8 27B on 16GB of memory that’s shared with Linux. Are people running models at 2bit quants? Are they even worth bothering with? I had assumed you go down to 4bit and if you need to go smaller you have to lose parameters.
You can, it's kind of cool to have this capability on something gaming at such a low price tag. Its not optimal for your time but beats nothing by a LOT. And that model is pretty reliable.
This isn't necessary related to this project but I got thinking about while reading it. Isn't it weird that shared memory was a cost saving measure by not having GPU dedicated has now been rechristened unified memory and is now a feature?
I understand why the AI people want it to help with the latency between the CPU and GPU. But having people in some cases use it as for marketing is kinda like getting watered down beer and getting told its a good thing because alcohol is bad for you.
Technically, “unified memory” is where both the GPU and CPU have access to the RAM over the same bus, which is different from the older, reviled “shared memory”, where the RAM was always at least one bus hop away from the GPU. But yes, there is a certain amount of spin to it, isn't there? (“You have less total memory now, and that's a Good Thing!”)
> I understand why the AI people want it to help with the latency between the CPU and GPU.
The reason AI users like it is because it provides a large amount of higher-bandwidth memory at a price much lower than an equivalent GPU.
If you had 16GB of DDR5 in a normal 2-channel consumer board it would not be this fast.
This gives 16GB of high speed memory for a very low price compared to a full GPU.
The larger unified memory systems like Strix Halo or Apple Silicon provide access to high bandwidth memory at scales you can’t get with any consumer GPU.
> But having people in some cases use it as for marketing is kinda like getting watered down beer and getting told its a good thing because alcohol is bad for you
I don’t think you understand the benefits of having high speed memory attached at a low price point.
Yes we would all prefer to have the same amount of even faster memory attached to a dedicated GPU, but that’s not happening at this price point.
Better analogy would be that this is an entry-level sports car for the price of a Honda Civic but you’re complaining that it’s not a Lamborghini.
> The reason AI users like it is because it provides a large amount of higher-bandwidth memory at a price much lower than an equivalent GPU.
But unified memory isn't providing high bandwidth. Apple's specific implementation on pro or higher chips does. There's a zillion desktops and laptops running unified memory at low to medium-low speeds, and the baseline M series is part of that with its 128 bit bus.
Most unified memory devices are handicapped because of the unification, not boosted. Yet people keep praising unified memory.
Primarily the bottleneck actually. PCIe bandwidth is extremely limited.
GDDR has worse latency than DDR and scaling it up to larger capacities faces challenges. So if you unify memory your options are small GDDR, large DDR, or expensive HBM.
Unusually, the BC-250 and PS5 both use GDDR with the CPU so the memory bandwidth is great but the latency not so much AFAIK. It's like using a dGPU as a full computer.
"many PS5 APUs that didn’t meet console spec (“binned” or “defective” for console use) got repurposed. Instead of being discarded, these chips were re-used for mining/higher-density hardware."
Not discussed much in the article, but it looks like:
TSMC → AMD controlled/qualified the usable off-spec parts → AMD supplied BC-250 parts to ASRock → ASRock sold mining hardware.
I actually got very interested in this sort of hardware repurposing, if someone know of any kind of place where people discuss and keep track of this, please share!
$60 gaming PC's are doable if you buy an "untested" Dell Optiplex and get lucky. A few years ago, I bought a couple of these in that price range that not only worked, but had a GPU of some kind. Good enough for Left4Dead at least, and some other Indie games. All they needed was an HDD with Windows 10 (both of which I had lying around - Win10 licenses can be had for a few bucks).
There's a similar board called the AMD 4800S (or 4700S). These are also repurposed PS5 SoC that didn't pass the graphics quality control. So what you get is a motherboard with CPU and 16GB RAM soldered on. No HDMI out, but it has a 16x PCIe slot (PCIe 4x 4.0) to connect a graphics card. The 4700S model is limited to 4x PCIe 2.0.
I checked it out and total cost is too high compared to what you get in modern Mini PCs. Also, the 4800S is difficult to get and 4700S supports only SATA SSDs.
You can get them that cheap, you just need a time machine. I built a few that were about that price including a free 128GB SSD in late 2024. The FSP500 PSU from one particular ebay seller was cheaper then too ($5-10).
Been really fun watching this go from e-waste to having mesa support and CU/CPU unlocks.
I bought one while waiting to see if my Steam Machine reservation would be fulfilled.
I paid ~$186 shipped for the board on eBay 5 weeks ago. I use an ATX power supply and NVMe that I had laying around and I printed a big case for it[0].
I seem to have gotten a good one as it has no problems after unlocking the extra CPU/GPU cores.
I run vanilla Arch on mine configured to boot into Steam. The jank factor is pretty high but it does trade blows with the Steam Machine for a fraction of the price.[1]
I did end up going through with the purchase of a 512GB Steam Machine for $1160 w/tax and swapped in a 2TB NVMe. It is definitely a more polished/living room-ready product and I'm happy with the hardware but it's definitely a questionable value.
It's worth reading over the docs[2] first before committing. There are lots of options for cooling, storage, and power supplies. Just depends on what you want to get out of it and how much time you want to invest in it. There are pre-made images so you don't necessarily need to be a Linux expert but it would help if you want to stay on top of the latest developments. There is still on-going work to get even more performance[3]
I think we will continue to see some performance improvements for both systems over the next coming months.
It works great if you turn the BC-250 on, play games, and turn it off.
By jank, I mean it's not a streamlined console experience like the Steam Machine. There's no suspend/resume and the idle power is quite high. If you want wifi/bluetooth, you'll have to pick a chipset well supported by Linux. (I use ethernet and a steam controller). If you want USB ports and a power button in the front like a console would have, you'll have to pick a solution for those. Carefully read over the options for power and cooling. They're very important if you're going for max performance. All the little extras add to the over-all cost as well.
https://mosfet.party/ sells a bunch of BC-250 add-ons to give you an idea of price and options.
Cloud gaming is incredible tech, I used GFN for a while and it was incredible.
HOWEVER, I will inevitably want to play weird stuff like "milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk", Pseudoregalia or Civ V Lekmod, which these cloud services do not offer.
The other alternative is "rent a VM" systems like Shadow Gaming, but they're much more expensive, and have much worse latency and streaming tech. Also the questionable practice of putting the credentials for my precious steam account in a random VM in some random data center.
104 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 14.1 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/csabakecskemeti/amd_bc-250_how-to
A metal and wood case could be worth $300.
A good design is worth something, and a good printing job is worth something, and the convenience of a service is worth something, but no amount of good design and quality printing job and service convenience can make a 3d printed case worth more than about $50 before shipping, and it would need to be somehow pretty special design to overcome some basic material and process weaknesses and still be functional and look good to be worth that much.
You can make all sorts of arguments about possible reasons for charging that exact price for that exact product, but no reasonable person is going to buy that.
It is also a very hacky build. You need to flash the BIOS which enables a few interesting unlocks: from 24 to 40 GPU compute units and 6 to 8 CPU cores. It's a bit of a silicon lottery and will depend on your specific board and you need to test everything thoroughly yourself, honing on a config that works for you.
The software side of things is Linux, so if you're familiar with setting it up it shouldn't be difficult to go through the different steps. There are a few distros that work well. I use Bazzite and boot directly to Steam big picture, the UX is great. You can exit to desktop and you have a fully usable Linux box that you can play around with from the comfort of your sofa.
One of the downsides is that it uses a lot of power when idling, about 80W. I just turn it off after using it. I'm working on a QOL feature: an ESP32-based power switch that starts the board when a specific BT device is detected (usually a controller). Once everything is setup the board works very nicely. It can be a bit loud depending on your fan/case combination. I'm currently printing this one[0]
It delivers about the same punch as a standard PS5. The hardware is remarkably similar, and much better than mini PCs set up with AMD APUs, unless you go Strix halo but that is another price league (10x). You can play Cyberpunk 2077 decently on it on settings similar to an AMD RX 6700XT.
A pretty impressive number is the memory bandwidth at ~410 GB/s, which should run local LLMs like Gemma 4 or Qwen3.8 27B at decent speed but with limited context size as its just 16Gb
Would I build it again? It was a lot of fun, but financially is not a crazy deal if you need to buy all the materials and factor your time in. Still much cheaper than a Steam Box!
- [0] https://makerworld.com/en/models/3021754-bc250-case-mkuu-fsp...
As for the idle dray, a lot of PC's have Wake On Lan so you can power it on via a special IP packet. I could't get it to work on mine, so i pus an esp32 based power monitoring plug in front of it, and configured the PC to power on directly when powered. When the power monitoring sees the PC sleeping for some time, it cuts the power. I control the plug via home assistant, so i can switch it on remotely
what for? just use DP
The only thing HDMI really has going for it TV's/home theater equipment. (And that's partially because most of the manufacturers are part of the HDMI forum, so they're the ones receiving the royalties that everyone else pays to use HDMI.)
Just to note there are already over a half dozen esp32 based power controllers. The BT detect is cool. Reddit is at the "Yet Another esp32 controller" phase, has been for a while. (I'm not sure if yours is the first or not to do that, I think I've seen similar but maybe it was just yours I saw.) Bless you esp32. Thank you for actually having the obvious good thing, wireless, available for the world (and why did no one else deign do so?)! https://www.reddit.com/r/BC250Gaming/comments/1uylmj0/yet_an...
With regards to the wireless power on, I was definitely not the trail blazer. I’m just using https://github.com/Thunkar/bc250-esp32-switch
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1pkdfcm/ugree...
It was all the rage towards getting 4K 120 Hz VRR on Linux before AMD came along to contribute proper HDMI 2.1 support to the kernel. There is also mention in that thread of a CableMatters adapter that could be flashed with an alternate firmware but it wasn't as stable.
https://unsloth.ai/docs/basics/dynamic-3.0-ggufs
If you can give the GPU units enough RAM to load the whole thing, it may be a little faster.
I'm not sure why would you want to run something at 3-4 tokens/s though. At least try a MoE model. I get about 30 tokens/s from those.
I understand why the AI people want it to help with the latency between the CPU and GPU. But having people in some cases use it as for marketing is kinda like getting watered down beer and getting told its a good thing because alcohol is bad for you.
The reason AI users like it is because it provides a large amount of higher-bandwidth memory at a price much lower than an equivalent GPU.
If you had 16GB of DDR5 in a normal 2-channel consumer board it would not be this fast.
This gives 16GB of high speed memory for a very low price compared to a full GPU.
The larger unified memory systems like Strix Halo or Apple Silicon provide access to high bandwidth memory at scales you can’t get with any consumer GPU.
> But having people in some cases use it as for marketing is kinda like getting watered down beer and getting told its a good thing because alcohol is bad for you
I don’t think you understand the benefits of having high speed memory attached at a low price point.
Yes we would all prefer to have the same amount of even faster memory attached to a dedicated GPU, but that’s not happening at this price point.
Better analogy would be that this is an entry-level sports car for the price of a Honda Civic but you’re complaining that it’s not a Lamborghini.
But unified memory isn't providing high bandwidth. Apple's specific implementation on pro or higher chips does. There's a zillion desktops and laptops running unified memory at low to medium-low speeds, and the baseline M series is part of that with its 128 bit bus.
Most unified memory devices are handicapped because of the unification, not boosted. Yet people keep praising unified memory.
Primarily the bottleneck actually. PCIe bandwidth is extremely limited.
GDDR has worse latency than DDR and scaling it up to larger capacities faces challenges. So if you unify memory your options are small GDDR, large DDR, or expensive HBM.
Unusually, the BC-250 and PS5 both use GDDR with the CPU so the memory bandwidth is great but the latency not so much AFAIK. It's like using a dGPU as a full computer.
Not discussed much in the article, but it looks like:
TSMC → AMD controlled/qualified the usable off-spec parts → AMD supplied BC-250 parts to ASRock → ASRock sold mining hardware.
I am not sure about Minecraft Windows.
Yeah, but a $60 lottery ticket that pays off in an X if you win isn’t a $60 X.
Dell business machines are pretty reliable. It's a much better wager than a lotto ticket.
I guffawed. And then closed the tab.
Been really fun watching this go from e-waste to having mesa support and CU/CPU unlocks.
Link: https://youtu.be/lmLh29LE2W4?is=QdRwtQS3xyyPt44E
I paid ~$186 shipped for the board on eBay 5 weeks ago. I use an ATX power supply and NVMe that I had laying around and I printed a big case for it[0].
I seem to have gotten a good one as it has no problems after unlocking the extra CPU/GPU cores.
I run vanilla Arch on mine configured to boot into Steam. The jank factor is pretty high but it does trade blows with the Steam Machine for a fraction of the price.[1]
I did end up going through with the purchase of a 512GB Steam Machine for $1160 w/tax and swapped in a 2TB NVMe. It is definitely a more polished/living room-ready product and I'm happy with the hardware but it's definitely a questionable value.
It's worth reading over the docs[2] first before committing. There are lots of options for cooling, storage, and power supplies. Just depends on what you want to get out of it and how much time you want to invest in it. There are pre-made images so you don't necessarily need to be a Linux expert but it would help if you want to stay on top of the latest developments. There is still on-going work to get even more performance[3]
- [0] https://www.printables.com/model/1789618-bc-250-atx-case-dua...
- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Sw1SdU9buQ
- [2] https://elektricm.github.io/amd-bc250-docs/
- [3] https://github.com/lonewolf0622/BC250-Native-Mesh-Shaders-
Is there any "jank" during active use or is this mostly a set up thing?
I think we will continue to see some performance improvements for both systems over the next coming months.
It works great if you turn the BC-250 on, play games, and turn it off.
By jank, I mean it's not a streamlined console experience like the Steam Machine. There's no suspend/resume and the idle power is quite high. If you want wifi/bluetooth, you'll have to pick a chipset well supported by Linux. (I use ethernet and a steam controller). If you want USB ports and a power button in the front like a console would have, you'll have to pick a solution for those. Carefully read over the options for power and cooling. They're very important if you're going for max performance. All the little extras add to the over-all cost as well.
https://mosfet.party/ sells a bunch of BC-250 add-ons to give you an idea of price and options.
Some of the smaller llm models run on it too but in practice the memory is way too limited for that use case.
HOWEVER, I will inevitably want to play weird stuff like "milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk", Pseudoregalia or Civ V Lekmod, which these cloud services do not offer.
The other alternative is "rent a VM" systems like Shadow Gaming, but they're much more expensive, and have much worse latency and streaming tech. Also the questionable practice of putting the credentials for my precious steam account in a random VM in some random data center.