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.
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.
- current price $200+
- limited VRAM (12-14 GB)
- poor performamce in clusters [1] - only 2 lanes of PCI-e 2.0 (still better than CMP XX HX mining cards)
[1] https://ciroluciotecce.it/en/posts/bc250-cluster-inferenza-l...
Dang at one point mentioned HN was planning to create another flag button specifically for obviously AI written content which would be the best solution IMO. If implemented then trivial AI complaints could be considered spam and told to use the AI flag instead.
Readers could then decide themselves if they want to click through after seeing some kind of small AI indicator next to the post when the flags pass some threshold, at least that's how imagined it could work for posts.
Had the idea from LTT but he went a bit bonkers and bought expensive hardware to transmit video and input over cables. Gigabit Ethernet is more than enough.
The form factor is unfortunate. I wonder what was the intended usage (server side gaming?) and if other high-volume parts (as game console APUs are) can become small similar systems, preferably with expandable memory). The history of how this thing came into being must be really interesting.
Speaking of form factors, it’s a shame there is no generic desktop/deskside/tower conversion kit for 4 and 5u rack servers. Some machines have tower counterparts, but having an aftermarket option would save a lot of machines from the metal crushers.
I’ve been doing 3D game development for retro consoles for fun and it’s actually quite impressive what you can actually achieve with little hardware.
And there's some amount of kernel upstreaming that makes it a bit friendlier than some.
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.
- https://github.com/mothenjoyer69/bc250-documentation
- https://gitlab.com/TuxThePenguin0/bc250-bios
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.
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.
So, essentially a decent Steam Link remote play server.
I guffawed. And then closed the tab.
Been really fun watching this go from e-waste to having mesa support and CU/CPU unlocks.
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 or slightly below RTX 3070.
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...
Edit: GPU performance comparison
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
I don't have an ethernet cable where the box is, so WoL is not an option for me either. I could have used something similar to your approach (very smart, by the way!) but decided to go ESP aiming for the most console-like experience of just grabbing the controller and playing your game
Yours seems a bit too eager though! I wouldn't want the thing to start up every time I get home as it turns the projector on, which lowers the projector screen, which blocks the (small) apartment's main entrance when lowered and would make me enter home on my fours ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thanks
[0] https://es.aliexpress.com/item/1005009609601844.html
[1] https://es.aliexpress.com/item/1005011847734240.html
[2] https://es.aliexpress.com/item/1005007479144456.html
[3] https://www.amazon.es/dp/B0DJDC74BP?th=1
https://unsloth.ai/docs/basics/dynamic-3.0-ggufs
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
what for? just use DP