I came across some articles about how people are upcycling a specific cryptocurrency mining single-board computer and decided to pick one up myself and put together a rig. The board is the AMD BC-250 which is similar to the APU in the PS5.

I’ve been out of the gaming scene since the Xbox 360 and never could justify the expense of building a gaming rig, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to build something decent for under $200. This thing rocks and can play my entire catalog of Steam games, many of which I bought on sale and worried later about having a PC that could actually run them.

Specs

  • CPU: 6x AMD Zen 2 cores @ ~3.5GHz (actually has 8 cores/16 threads, but I haven’t yet unlocked the other 2)
  • GPU: 24 RDNA2 Compute Units with 1536 shaders. Actually has 40 compute units, and you can unlock the remaining ones pretty easily. The PS5 has, I believe, 36 CUs active.
  • Memory: 16GB GDDR6 shared memory
  • TDP: 220W (50W idle - 235W max load)
  • OS Support: Linux only (no Windows GPU drivers)

I/O

  • 2x USB 3.0 (A only)
  • 2x USB 2.0
  • 1x RJ-45 gigabit ethernet
  • 1x DisplayPort output
  • 2x buttons. One is power and the other seems to be reset

Cost and Parts

  • BC-250 APU - $125 (sadly they’ve jumped in price again and are now $165)
  • 300W 12v PSU - $35
  • 500 GB NVMe SSD - $0 since I already had a few spare ones on hand
  • 120mm Fan - $17 for a 3-pack
  • 8-pin PCIe power cable - $3 (to connect from the PSU to the APU)

Total cost: $180 though would have been closer to $250 if didn’t already have an SSD on hand. Price also doesn’t include the filament I used to print the case as I already had that as well. I didn’t check the exact usage, but expect to use the better part of a 1 kg roll on the print. It used about half a roll of red and half a roll of black in my case.

A few optional components added to the build that I already had in my parts bin:

  • Game controller (you can use a Xbox or PS4 controller if you add a USB bluetooth adapter)
  • USB Hub
  • USB Wifi adapter (it’s only got wired ethernet onboard)
  • Passive DP to HDMI cable (to connect to my HDMI-only TV)

Depending on the parts you have on hand, you could still potentially build this for $200 or less even after the price hike of the boards.

I’m running Bazzite on it and booting directly into Steam Big Picture. Works great!

Resources

View of the Guts

Note: These aren’t mine and are from the Printables model page as I neglected to take photos as I went, and it’s kind of a pain to disassemble this because of the way it goes together. I also modded the heatsink and cut off the little ridges since it was originally made for rack cooling and didn’t cool well with just a fan on top.