Back in 2021, AMD's crypto-mining-focused BC-250 graphics card, powered by the Sony PlayStation 5’s APU instead of regular GPU chips, started popping up on eBay for around $500. Fast forward to the present day, and similar units are now available in China for as low as £96, or about $120. One such unit was ordered and procured by the creator of the YouTube channel Budget-Builds Official, notably sold as the “PS5 graphics card.”
The unit received by the YouTuber indeed looked like a GPU; however, in reality, it was a server-style motherboard with a large passive heatsink, power and fan headers, I/O ports including DisplayPort, USB 2.0/3.0 ports, Ethernet, as well as a CMOS battery slot. The unit also included a standard 8-pin PCIe connector to feed power and an I/O shield. According to the YouTuber, at its core, the custom board included the BC-250, a cut-down version of the APU used on the PS5, with six Zen 2 cores (compared to eight on the console), 12 threads, 24 compute units (compared to 36 on the console), and 16GB of GDDR6 memory. Interestingly, the board did not include any provision for standard DDR memory; instead, the GDDR6 memory was divided equally between the system and the Radeon GPU.
To power up the board, a standard 1,000W PSU was used along with an SSD, peripherals, monitor, CMOS battery, and a standard 120mm fan to actively cool the heatsink. To the YouTuber’s surprise, the janky system came to life, booting directly into the BIOS. After loading Linux, initial testing with Half-Life 2 and 3DMark’s Time Spy and Fire Strike benchmarks failed, likely due to issues with Linux drivers.
After some tinkering, the YouTuber was eventually able to run Half-Life 2 at over 200 FPS, however, 3DMark benchmarks did not show any signs of stability. Additionally, more games were tested, including GTA V Enhanced Edition, which ran at an average of 65 FPS at 1440p high settings and 25–30 FPS with ray tracing enabled. Counter-Strike 2 rendered fairly well at 1440p in a competitive setting, averaging 130 FPS. Surprisingly, demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Hitman 3 also managed to run at 1080p high settings with 42 FPS and 47 FPS, respectively.
While the performance of the custom BC-250 board may not be able to replace your Nvidia RTX or AMD Radeon GPU-powered gaming rig any time soon, it is interesting to see a PS5 APU converted into a working desktop. At $120, it might be one of the cheapest gaming PCs out there, but in reality, it is truly a collector’s item and highlights how inventive PC enthusiasts can get when given the right hardware and a bit of determination.
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