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.
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.
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.
However, being optimized for a server environment, the BC-250 does have some weird quirks. ETA Prime had to update the BIOS to a custom version to make it work as a gaming machine, and the board only has a single slow PCIe 2.0 x2 M.2 slot, limiting storage options. The board is also incompatible with standard PC cases and cooling solutions; however, you can find cases that work with the BC-250 for around $50 on eBay (at the time of writing).
If you can get around these issues, ETA Prime's work reveals that the BC-250 represents one of the cheapest methods to get into PC gaming right now. All in all, you are probably looking at a $200-$300 machine accounting for SSD storage and a power supply (though some BC-250 eBay listings include a PSU). The best part about this budget setup is that it includes 16GB of GDDR6 memory, making the outgoing RAM pricing crisis completely irrelevant.
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