Re-Enable All Compute Units On The PS5-like BC-250 Cryptomining Card

June 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

The custom APU at the core of Sony’s PlayStation 5 hasn’t just been quietly powering these game consoles, but also made their way onto cryptomining cards around 2023 which are called the BC-250. The APUs on these boards differ from the one found in the PS5 most notably by having two out of eight CPU cores disabled, along with many compute units (CUs) of the iGPU. Now apparently it seems that you can re-enable these CUs per instructions by [duggasco] if you’re feeling adventurous.

The BC-250's AMD APU in all its glory. (Credit: Lowest Logan, YouTube) — The BC-250’s AMD APU in all its glory. (Credit: Lowest Logan, YouTube)

As stated in the project’s README, BC-250 boards come with only 24 out of 40 CUs enabled, but this is not a permanent (e-fuse) thing. Instead you can write to two hardware registers during the GPU driver initialization, something which can be added to for example the Linux kernel module parameters.

Since many of these APUs likely had cores and CUs disabled due to them failing QA during PS5 APU manufacturing, there’s a good chance that some of the CUs truly are bad. Yet as we saw with the AMD Phenom II X3 with a supposedly bad fourth core back in the day, sometimes demand for the ‘defective’ part is high enough that good parts get mixed in as well.

Thus people like [Lowest Logan] decided to give it a shot, demonstrating the use of the patch with Bazzite Linux on a BC-250 system. After a reboot the system does indeed list 40 CUs as being enabled, and running Furmark shows a big boost in performance without any glitches or fire. There is of course thermal throttling, but that is due to the default cooling solution not being designed for running it at full blast.

Incidentally the real PS5 has only 36 active CUs, so this technically makes these unlocked APUs more powerful. With the water cooling solution demonstrated by [Lowest Logan] the thermal throttling is also resolved, showing that you can get a pretty nice gaming system out of these old cryptomining boards if you happen to win the silicon lottery.

Continue reading “Re-Enable All Compute Units On The PS5-like BC-250 Cryptomining Card” →

Repurposing Old AMD APUs For AI Work

March 18, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 22 Comments

The BC250 is what AMD calls an APU, or Accelerated Processing Unit. It combines a GPU and CPU into a single unit, and was originally built to serve as the heart of certain Samsung rack mount servers. If you know where to find cheap surplus units of the BC250, you can put them to good use for AI work, as [akandr] demonstrates.

The first thing you’ll have to figure out is how to take an individual BC250 APU and get it up and running. It’s effectively a full system-on-chip, combining a Zen 2 CPU with a Cyan Skillfish RDNA 1.5 GPU. However, it was originally intended to run inside a rackmount server unit rather than a standalone machine. To get it going, you’ll need to hook it up with power and some kind of cooling solution.

From there, it’s a matter of software. [akandr] explains how to get AI workflows running on the BC250 using Ollama and Vulkan, while noting useful hacks to improve performance like disabling the GUI and tweaking the CPU governor. The hardware can be used with a wide range of different models depending on what you’re trying to achieve, it just takes some careful management of the APU’s resources to get the most out of it. Thankfully, that’s all in the guide on GitHub.

We’ve already seen these AMD APUs repurposed before for gaming use. Unfortunately the word is out already about their capabilities, so prices have risen significantly in response to demand. Still, if you manage to score a BC250 and do something cool with it yourself, be sure to let us know on the tipsline!