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AMD BC-250

6owners with an opinion
83%of verdicts positive
5/1positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and value; criticized for reliability.

What owners wrote

Neutral
No. I bought it for about 150 shipping included from Canada to Spain. I reckon I spent about 300$ in total, the most expensive thing being the 1Tb NVMe. 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
Likes it
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 Stri…
Likes it
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] - [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-
Doesn’t like it
They are very close in benchmarks. https://i.imgur.com/Bk5Dcfb.jpeg 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.
Likes it
I have one of these I haven't gotten around to futzing with, but have two friends who bought two (each) and have been playing with them for local inference. Notably we did some research and my one friend has had some luck using the M.2 slot with a PCIe adapter to a ConnectX 3 card and then using that to do multinode coordination (using RDMA and a llama.cpp patch) and has been getting almost 20 tok/s decode out of Qwen3.8 27b dividing it up between two BC250s and a coordinating PC. Prefill is weak though. A lot of futzing around so not worth it if you don't enjoy that kind of thing, but remarkably cheaper than buying GPUs or a DGX Spark. (I have a Spark so I really shouldn't be bothering... but....) Fun.
Likes it
I have one of these and it has been a fantastic project, and a solid steam machine stand in. Great for emulation and even some recent games. Not mentioned in the post but it is a repurposed PS5 APU. the 8 cpu core unlock that just became available seems to get you an additional 10fps.
Likes it
Hi HN. I got my hands on an AMD BC-250 (the obscure GFX1013 chip, a repurposed PS5 APU used for crypto mining). Since ROCm officially ignores this hardware, I had to bypass it entirely using Vulkan and tweak the Linux kernel's TTM pages_limit to unlock the full 16GB of Unified Memory. Result: It runs a 35B MoE model at 38 tok/s and FLUX.2 for image generation. It's essentially a poor man's Mac Studio for Edge AI. Visit the page to see some benchmarks.
Recommends itHasn’t owned it
CPU is a rather weak Zen2. If that still appeals to you, instead purchase a BC-250 mining board. It's a PS5 reject and nearly all of them can be fully unlocked for all 40CUs and 8 CPU cores. They are quite popular right now for building Steam Machines and all the hacking has been done with replacement BIOS mods.