I came across some articles about how people are upcycling a specific cryptocurrency mining single-board computer and decided to pick one up myself and put together a rig. The board is the AMD BC-250 which is similar to the APU in the PS5.

I've been out of the gaming scene since the Xbox 360 and never could justify the expense of building a gaming rig, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to build something decent for under $200. This thing rocks and can play my entire catalog of Steam games, many of which I bought on sale and worried later about having a PC that could actually run them.

Specs

• CPU: 6x AMD Zen 2 cores @ ~3.5GHz (actually has 8 cores/16 threads, but I haven't yet unlocked the other 2)
• GPU: 24 RDNA2 Compute Units with 1536 shaders. Actually has 40 compute units, and you can unlock the remaining ones pretty easily. The PS5 has, I believe, 36 CUs active.
• Memory: 16GB GDDR6 shared memory
• TDP: 220W (50W idle - 235W max load)
• OS Support: Linux only (no Windows GPU drivers)

I/O

• 2x USB 3.0 (A only)
• 2x USB 2.0
• 1x RJ-45 gigabit ethernet
• 1x DisplayPort output
• 2x buttons. One is power and the other seems to be reset

Cost and Parts

• BC-250 APU - $125 (sadly they've jumped in price again and are now $165)
• 300W 12v PSU - $35
• 500 GB NVMe SSD - $0 since I already had a few spare ones on hand
• 120mm Fan - $17 for a 3-pack
• 8-pin PCIe power cable - $3 (to connect from the PSU to the APU)

Total cost: $180 though would have been closer to $250 if didn't already have an SSD on hand. Price also doesn't include the filament I used to print the case as I already had that as well. I didn't check the exact usage, but expect to use the better part of a 1 kg roll on the print. It used about half a roll of red and half a roll of black in my case.

A few optional components added to the build that I already had in my parts bin:

• Game controller (you can use a Xbox or PS4 controller if you add a USB bluetooth adapter)
• USB Hub
• USB Wifi adapter (it's only got wired ethernet onboard)
• Passive DP to HDMI cable (to connect to my HDMI-only TV)

Depending on the parts you have on hand, you could still potentially build this for $200 or less even after the price hike of the boards.

I'm running Bazzite on it and booting directly into Steam Big Picture. Works great!

Resources

• Building a Budget Steam Machine with the ASRock BC-250, a Variant of the PS5 APU
• AMD BC-250 Documentation
• GPU Governor Guidance
• Modified BIOS to Enable GPU Memory Split
• Case Model
• Power Supply - Any decent 300+ watt one will do, but this is what I bought to fit the case I found
• AMD BC-250 eBay Listings - I paid $125 but they're sadly $165 and up now

View of the Guts

Note: These aren't mine and are from the Printables model page as I neglected to take photos as I went, and it's kind of a pain to disassemble this because of the way it goes together. I also modded the heatsink and cut off the little ridges since it was originally made for rack cooling and didn't cool well with just a fan on top.