The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)

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

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-

https://github.com/csabakecskemeti/amd_bc-250_how-to

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.

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.

- 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...

Yeah the prices were much lower last year, but I think this is still a good deal for the tinkerers.

I've just added the how to portion of the CU 32->40 unlock on Manjaro Linux. Plus added an AGENTS.md so you can use your favorite AI to guide you trough the full process.

Happy hacking!

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.

- https://github.com/mothenjoyer69/bc250-documentation

- https://gitlab.com/TuxThePenguin0/bc250-bios

- https://bc250.info/

Some of the smaller llm models run on it too but in practice the memory is way too limited for that use case.

So, essentially a decent Steam Link remote play server.

I guffawed. And then closed the tab.