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With the reintroduction of the Steam Machine, DIY enthusiasts have been having fun making their own versions of Valve’s console, often using standard PC components and Bazzite; a Fedora-based distro that resembles Valve’s own SteamOS. However, this latest homebrewed Steam Machine creation is quite unique. Handheld/SFF enthusiast YouTube Channel ETA Prime showed off a DIY Steam machine setup using a mining blade that uses a B-grade PS5 SoC.
The hardware being used for this setup is an ASRock BC-250 mining blade that takes advantage of a defective PS5 SoC with disabled bits. Specs consist of six Zen 2 cores with 12 threads, 24 RDNA 2 CUs, and 16GB of GDDR6 memory. Compared to the base PS5, which has eight Zen 2 cores and 36 CUs, the neutered counterpart in ASRock’s mining board has 25% fewer cores and 33% fewer GPU cores.
$100 Steam Machine Using a PS5 APU (ASRock BC-250) – YouTube
Thanks to crypto mining becoming mostly niche and requiring dedicated ASICs to churn out profitable income, ETA Prime reports that ASRock BC-250 boards are showing up all over eBay for prices as low as $100-$120. We can confirm the YouTuber’s findings, but not the price. The lowest price we could find for a BC-250 on eBay was around $150.
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Despite having two-thirds the GPU performance of a base PS5, ETA Prime discovered the BC-250 mining board performs adequately as a DIY Steam machine for 1080p gaming. After overclocking the GPU to 2000MHz, their benchmarks saw the SoC running Left 4 Dead 2 at well over 150 FPS at 1080p with max settings, Spider-Man 2 running at around 60 FPS at 1080p medium settings with FSR set to Balanced, The Witcher 3 running at around 75 FPS at 1080p with high settings, and Forza Horizon 5 running at around 80 FPS at 1080p medium settings. Cyberpunk 2077 was able to hit almost 60 FPS on average at 1080p with medium settings, as well.