ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine(plug-world.com)
45 pointsby plug_world5 hours ago6 comments
  • saidinesh5an hour ago
    This is a really good card that keeps on getting better.

    After my steam deck battery puffed up and my RX580 became too old to play any modern games, I had two choices:

    1. Upgrade to a new GPU - this was costing me $300 at the very least for a 3 year old card

    2. Hope to get a steam machine - but the crazy queue and the $1000 price tag really soured me on this

    3. Get a bc-250 for $150 and make do for a year or two before upgrading.

    I'm so glad I went with this option. I just used my old atx power supply and old PC case. Everything almost just works. It consumes lot less power than my previous gaming PC. It's a lot more silent. Some times there's a crash or two. I'm waiting to upgrade the power connector before unlocking it's full potential (40 compute units, and the two extra cores). So far I've finished playing Spider-Man 2, Hogwarts legacy, now playing 007 first light.

  • ThatPlayer2 hours ago
    Recent development has 2 / 8 of the CPU cores able to be unlocked too. Originally shipped with 6 CPU cores enabled.
  • toplinesoftsysan hour ago
    Very good article. I have suggestion for the next one - affordable computer for running the latest open-source AI models. That will be a huge hit!
  • doctorpangloss3 hours ago
    From the article:

    > MESSA_SHADER_CACHE_MAX_SIZE

    MESSA indeed.

    • voxadam2 hours ago
      At least we can be reasonably confident an LLM didn't write the article.
  • jimmydoe4 hours ago
    wondering how is idle power after optimization
    • lucius_verus2 hours ago
      According to the docs, with a governor installed you go from 85-105W at idle to 65-85W.

      Reference: https://elektricm.github.io/amd-bc250-docs/system/governor/

    • plug_world3 hours ago
      Unfortunately I don't have the tools to measure the power draw directly from the outlet.

      But the software reports 30-45W power draw when the systems at max load. However lower-end titles and idle draw hovers between 10W-20W.

      • jauntywundrkind2 hours ago
        I would absolutely not buy assuming this. People used to work hard to get 70W at the socket idle. Things have gotten better, much better, but at the socket those sound like miracle numbers.
        • dannywan hour ago
          Those absolutely are miracle numbers and don’t seem remotely accurate. What does the wall report?

          I remember people were saying this IDLES at like 80w wall, I’m sure it’s been optimised, but 35w at load is super unlikely

  • nsxwolf3 hours ago
    How well does HDMI CEC work on this?
    • plug_world3 hours ago
      If you get the right adapter, I've seen others get HDMI CEC working.

      However, quality of life features like sleep/hibernate don't work at all on this system. I've also seen people use an ESP32 to power on the system with a bluetooth controller which is pretty neat especially if you combined that with CEC.

      • aleksejs2 hours ago
        I just added CEC to mine today by soldering some wires to my DP-to-HDMI adapter and having Claude write some firmware to run on a Pi Pico to inject the CEC messages at the right time.

        It's not the most elegant solution but felt in the spirit of the whole BC-250 experience.

    • ThatPlayer2 hours ago
      It has no HDMI port. Some DP > HDMI adapters do CEC.
    • falcojr3 hours ago
      Not at all