For various reasons, crypto mining has fallen to the wayside in recent years. Partially because it was never useful other than as a speculative investment and partially because other speculative investments have been more popular lately, there are all kinds of old mining hardware available at bargain prices. One of those is the Asrock AMD BC250, which is essentially a cut down Playstation 5 but which has almost everything built into it that a gaming PC would need to run Steam, and [ETA PRIME] shows us how to get this system set up.
The first steps are to provide the computer with power, an SSD, and a fan for cooling. It’s meant to be in a server rack so this part at least is pretty straightforward. After getting it powered up there are a few changes to make in the BIOS, mostly related to memory management. [ETA PRIME] is uzing Bazzite as an operating system which helps to get games up and running easily. It plays modern games and even AAA titles at respectable resolutions and framerates almost out-of-the-box, which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising since this APU has a six-core Zen 2 processor with a fairly powerful RDNA2 graphics card, all on one board.
It’s worth noting that this build is a few weeks old now, and the video has gotten popular enough that the BC250 cards that [ETA PRIME] was able to find for $100 are reported to be much more expensive now. Still, though, even at double or triple the price this might still be an attractive price point for a self-contained, fun, small computer that lets you game relatively easily and resembles the Steam Machine in concept. There are plenty of other builds based on old mining hardware as well, so don’t limit yourself to this one popular piece of hardware. This old mining rig, for example, made an excellent media server.
Curious about the history here. Is it really the guts of a ps5? That what caused the ps5 shortage? So many questions!
These are built around the integrated CPU/GPU that AMD designed and TSMC manufactured for the Playstation 5, but with a quarter of the compute units disabled (24 instead of 32).
So no, nobody pilfered the guts out of PS5s to make these, but they’re perhaps the only other system built around this custom APU.
I don’t know if it’s true, but a common assumption is that these were (at least initially) PS5 APUs that didn’t pass QA for their intended market after the testing and binning process, but still performed acceptably with some of their compute units fused off.
In any case, asrock saw an opportunity to build blade servers for mining out of ’em.
The 4700S dev kit is a very similar-looking board/chip, albeit with no GPU component.
Yep, and those were also presumed to be PS5 cast-offs by Tom’s Hardware and others.
The BC250 from this article more or less identifies itself as a 4700s, CPU-wise – all of them really do seem to be the same APU with different bits disabled.
Thanks for the insights!
its actually $200 now after this video
software situation is MUCH worse than the video lets on
can you elaborate some on this please.
Performance wise they kinda suck for gaming. Nothing more than the common throw away office computers you can find for free pr <100$
They have ASICs in them to do one thing really well – calculate some hashes. Everything else, expect mediocre performance. Still, one more option in the “I need a really cheap linux server” race, and since they’re rack mountable, they do beat out the HP and others cheap, small desktop line. I guess I’m thinking more of an 8-node Kubernetes cluster running tasks if that helps.
No they don’t?! Hashes are calculated in the GPU portion.
Did you watch the video? These were made from PS5 APU rejects and have no mining specific ASICs onboard.
And no, that doesn’t help. They have garbage idle power consumption and limited I/O and storage, making them terrible for homelabbing. Even worse now that the YouTube hype train has caused the price to double overnight.
Please enlighten me as to what office PC has 28 CUs and AMD 5600 XT like performance? The only APU with that level of performance is the newer Ryzen Strix Point Halo 385 or 395 chip. The older CPUs you’re thinking of top out at 12 to 16CUs, and we’re talking about half the performance.
So unless you’re talking about old desktops with $250 used AMD 5060XT or equivalent dedicated graphics cards in them, you’re mistaken on the performance capabilities here being easily replicated on a budget. This 28 CU chip is fast enough to run most games at 1080p on medium to high settings at around 60fps.
I think the dispute was over “what the available easily-accessible software can do”, versus “what the hardware could do if someone cared to optimize for it”.
re: @DIYvsOTS, “what the available easily-accessible software can do”…
While I wouldn’t suggest that the setup demonstrated in the video – flashing a bios update, installing a recent version of a linux distribution like Bazzite, and changing a few kernel boot settings- is trivial, that’s really all you need to do to get something that runs all the games that’ll work on a steam deck (but with a much better GPU) or anything else that’ll run on linux (or in a VM within linux).
And yet it’s simultaneously also true that you’re not getting “what the hardware could do if someone cared to optimize for it” – when it comes to games that run on both systems, this thing isn’t remotely close to 3/4 of a PS5.
Personally, I still think this is a fabulous little system for the money if you understand its significant limitations (some of which other commenters have touched on, like idle power draw) and have a sensible use case.
Ehhh I just picked up a BC250 off eBay for $150. Just gotta look around a bit to skip the price gouging.
First mayor issue is the idle power draw. Which is 80w.
Second, this is an US only thing. Good luck getting one in the EU for a reasonable price (not ~400 euro which is what you would pay if you include shipping, import taxes, VAT, handling fees, etc).
And now that the videos are out and people started buying these the base price doubled too.
Who cares about idle power draw? You’re getting a full system with 28CUs for $150, to build a comparable mini PC you need a Ryzen 3600 or 5600, and a 5600XT GPU. Those components alone plus memory will set you back $500 used, and that total system will also have a similar idle power draw.
If you’re really worried about 80 watts of power, I don’t think you have your priorities right at home.
hahaha “I don’t think you have your priorities right” is a funny way to put it
everything has trade offs and people are gonna land at different spots on that spectrum. Personally, i’m pleased with my 8 core ‘supercomputer’ that stays cool even with the stock cooling solution and doesn’t toast my vintage power supply with a dead fan :P
80 Watts of IDLE per server soon adds up to something stupidly unreasonably for the average home labber and if they are in Europe (etc) with comparatively high energy prices it gets even worse.
800 watt of compute per server while its running flat out might be perfectly acceptable, but most home lab folks will have their “rack of servers” with only ever one or two of them working hard at a time – So that idle power draw for the 4U unit of these things would be a killer cost efficiency wise that far outstrips any small cost saving in the initial purchase here over their lifetime.
Here in the UK where electric is stupidly expensive that on 4U rack unit idling but all nodes on would be in the buying a pint at at least outside of London and posh pubs per day, every day, (Note not a recommendation) where something idling in the usual 15-25w sort of range most home labbers seem to get when they don’t even really try the total for the same number of nodes…
The only way it doesn’t matter is if the system is only on while you are actively using it – in which case awful idle doesn’t matter very much, as while it might get to a more idle state sometimes its going to actually be working.
I bought one on AliExpress 2 days ago for 159€ (179€ – 20€ coupon) including VAT and shipping to France. I don’t know if there will be import taxes.
Lien ? Si ça inclut la TVA, ça veut dire que le prix de base est < 150 donc normalement pas de taxe.
These used to be $50usd not that long ago
At least, I got one for that price, they were all around that at the time…
Don’t reward the scalpers! If you buy one for $250+ you’re gonna have a mediocre machine that’s only worth $120. It will probably be e-waste in 2-3 years.
These modules used to be crazy cheap but then a couple of patches to fix linux kernel support for these playstation APUs landed, phoronix wrote an article about it, and the prices for all of them instantly started doubling. Not really worth it anymore.
I saw one of these on ebay the other day and gave it some thought for awhile, I dont have the spare cash to burn on something like this, but I am sucker for odd quirky unusual hardware. But the only real reasons why I would actually blow cash on this type of equipment would be if either I could play games on it, or if it could run Folding@Home or Boinc workloads, and according to the other commenters here it pretty much sucks at everything except for generating hashes. And apparently since scalpers are interested in them, maybe hoping for another surge of crypto farming, I hope some scalper ends up with an entire garage full of them getting no sales.
Lol.. Don’t be a hater. Sony released these APU’s to Asrock to prevent e-waste.. Little did they know the open source community would make them work as little linux boxes. They will never be worthless now that they have roaring support for a rather large community. We should all be happy they haven’t been dumped into the bottom of a landfill. If you did your homework.. They’re essentially a Ryzen 2600x + RX6600 with 16GB DDR6 unified memory. If you knew anything about anything you could get these singing with diskless pxe boot.