I built one of these. It is not possible to do so for 60$ anymore since the board itself goes for 150+. On top of that you still need a PSU, NVMe, a high pressure fan, DP to HDMI adapter, possibly BT and Wifi adapters, and a 3d-printed or DIY case.
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!
Was it possible to build it for $60 when you built it though?
As for the idle dray, a lot of PC's have Wake On Lan so you can power it on via a special IP packet. I could't get it to work on mine, so i pus an esp32 based power monitoring plug in front of it, and configured the PC to power on directly when powered. When the power monitoring sees the PC sleeping for some time, it cuts the power. I control the plug via home assistant, so i can switch it on remotely
No. I bought it for about 150 shipping included from Canada to Spain. I reckon I spent about 300$ in total, the most expensive thing being the 1Tb NVMe.
I don't have an ethernet cable where the box is, so WoL is not an option for me either. I could have used something similar to your approach (very smart, by the way!) but decided to go ESP aiming for the most console-like experience of just grabbing the controller and playing your game
WoWLAN is a thing. On my motherboard it works so well that it wakes up whenever my phone, laptop or steam deck connect to the WiFi, not just when I actually send the magic packets!
First time I hear about WoWLAN, thanks! I will check if it can work with my cheap usb Wifi adapter.
Yours seems a bit too eager though! I wouldn't want the thing to start up every time I get home as it turns the projector on, which lowers the projector screen, which blocks the (small) apartment's main entrance when lowered and would make me enter home on my fours ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You are _not_ getting one of these for less than $300, and because of this post and many like it, there are countless scams selling just cases for them at this price from a dollar or two of filament.
This always makes me ambivalent about enthusiast blog posts. Like on the one hand, cool that the knowledge gets spread. On the other hand, whenever one gets popular, another hidden gem skyrockets in price or becomes semi-permanently low in stock.
If it's advertised as a case and it works, why is it a scam? I don't own a 3D printer, nor do I know anyone who does. If someone is designing, printing, and selling a useful product, why is that a scam?
I think they are saying people mislead customers into thinking they are getting a "$60 gaming pc" when they are actually just getting a 3d printed case with nothing inside.
Automatically no 3d printed case is worth $300 because it's not possible to make it good enough quality.
A metal and wood case could be worth $300.
A good design is worth something, and a good printing job is worth something, and the convenience of a service is worth something, but no amount of good design and quality printing job and service convenience can make a 3d printed case worth more than about $50 before shipping, and it would need to be somehow pretty special design to overcome some basic material and process weaknesses and still be functional and look good to be worth that much.
$300 is too high, but $50 is too low. 3D print sellers aren't doing injection molded parts at scale, nor offshoring the labor. For GP's linked case file; between the filament, the compatible linked switch and fan hardware not purchased by the thousands, and someone paying themself at least minimum wage to print all 46 individual parts and then to partially assemble and package it up nicely (and not counting printer hardware depreciation or electricity), $50 for it is not a viable product to sell or to run as a business. That's the price I would budget for making it myself with the 3D printer I already own and not counting my time as a cost, not something I would waste my time with selling.
This isn't necessary related to this project but I got thinking about while reading it. Isn't it weird that shared memory was a cost saving measure by not having GPU dedicated has now been rechristened unified memory and is now a feature?
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.
Technically, “unified memory” is where both the GPU and CPU have access to the RAM over the same bus, which is different from the older, reviled “shared memory”, where the RAM was always at least one bus hop away from the GPU. But yes, there is a certain amount of spin to it, isn't there? (“You have less total memory now, and that's a Good Thing!”)
Primarily the bottleneck actually. PCIe bandwidth is extremely limited.
GDDR has worse latency than DDR and scaling it up to larger capacities faces challenges. So if you unify memory your options are small GDDR, large DDR, or expensive HBM.
Unusually, the BC-250 and PS5 both use GDDR with the CPU so the memory bandwidth is great but the latency not so much AFAIK. It's like using a dGPU as a full computer.
> I understand why the AI people want it to help with the latency between the CPU and GPU.
The reason AI users like it is because it provides a large amount of higher-bandwidth memory at a price much lower than an equivalent GPU.
If you had 16GB of DDR5 in a normal 2-channel consumer board it would not be this fast.
This gives 16GB of high speed memory for a very low price compared to a full GPU.
The larger unified memory systems like Strix Halo or Apple Silicon provide access to high bandwidth memory at scales you can’t get with any consumer 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
I don’t think you understand the benefits of having high speed memory attached at a low price point.
Yes we would all prefer to have the same amount of even faster memory attached to a dedicated GPU, but that’s not happening at this price point.
Better analogy would be that this is an entry-level sports car for the price of a Honda Civic but you’re complaining that it’s not a Lamborghini.
There's a similar board called the AMD 4800S (or 4700S). These are also repurposed PS5 SoC that didn't pass the graphics quality control. So what you get is a motherboard with CPU and 16GB RAM soldered on. No HDMI out, but it has a 16x PCIe slot (PCIe 4x 4.0) to connect a graphics card. The 4700S model is limited to 4x PCIe 2.0.
$60 gaming PC's are doable if you buy an "untested" Dell Optiplex and get lucky. A few years ago, I bought a couple of these in that price range that not only worked, but had a GPU of some kind. Good enough for Left4Dead at least, and some other Indie games. All they needed was an HDD with Windows 10 (both of which I had lying around - Win10 licenses can be had for a few bucks).
I actually got very interested in this sort of hardware repurposing, if someone know of any kind of place where people discuss and keep track of this, please share!
"many PS5 APUs that didn’t meet console spec (“binned” or “defective” for console use) got repurposed. Instead of being discarded, these chips were re-used for mining/higher-density hardware."
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.
No graphics output. And so loud you wouldn’t be able to hear your game either. Also they use about 1kw of power, so you’d only want to run it in the winter.
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
what for? just use DP
As for the idle dray, a lot of PC's have Wake On Lan so you can power it on via a special IP packet. I could't get it to work on mine, so i pus an esp32 based power monitoring plug in front of it, and configured the PC to power on directly when powered. When the power monitoring sees the PC sleeping for some time, it cuts the power. I control the plug via home assistant, so i can switch it on remotely
I don't have an ethernet cable where the box is, so WoL is not an option for me either. I could have used something similar to your approach (very smart, by the way!) but decided to go ESP aiming for the most console-like experience of just grabbing the controller and playing your game
Yours seems a bit too eager though! I wouldn't want the thing to start up every time I get home as it turns the projector on, which lowers the projector screen, which blocks the (small) apartment's main entrance when lowered and would make me enter home on my fours ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A metal and wood case could be worth $300.
A good design is worth something, and a good printing job is worth something, and the convenience of a service is worth something, but no amount of good design and quality printing job and service convenience can make a 3d printed case worth more than about $50 before shipping, and it would need to be somehow pretty special design to overcome some basic material and process weaknesses and still be functional and look good to be worth that much.
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.
Primarily the bottleneck actually. PCIe bandwidth is extremely limited.
GDDR has worse latency than DDR and scaling it up to larger capacities faces challenges. So if you unify memory your options are small GDDR, large DDR, or expensive HBM.
Unusually, the BC-250 and PS5 both use GDDR with the CPU so the memory bandwidth is great but the latency not so much AFAIK. It's like using a dGPU as a full computer.
The reason AI users like it is because it provides a large amount of higher-bandwidth memory at a price much lower than an equivalent GPU.
If you had 16GB of DDR5 in a normal 2-channel consumer board it would not be this fast.
This gives 16GB of high speed memory for a very low price compared to a full GPU.
The larger unified memory systems like Strix Halo or Apple Silicon provide access to high bandwidth memory at scales you can’t get with any consumer 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
I don’t think you understand the benefits of having high speed memory attached at a low price point.
Yes we would all prefer to have the same amount of even faster memory attached to a dedicated GPU, but that’s not happening at this price point.
Better analogy would be that this is an entry-level sports car for the price of a Honda Civic but you’re complaining that it’s not a Lamborghini.
I guffawed. And then closed the tab.
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.