Someone run games on AMD BC-250 under Linux * Cut down PS5 die to 6 CPU cores 24 GPU cores for use in crypto mining

[Rabit]

If community mange to fix current driver issues, can be potentially entry level gaming PC for tech savvy people due can be find for only $50.

After OC iGPU is only slightly behind RX 6600 performance.
CPU performance is close to Ryzen 5 2600x

 

[eidairaman1]

Ok a blade asic

 

[Toothless]

Flashbacks when a cluster was made from playstations

 

[sepheronx]

I saw this earlier and was thinking of picking one up and testing it.

Try to build an ITX case with a flex or smaller PSU and get some kind of low budget gaming PC.

 

[sam_86314]

My curiosity got the better of me, so I went ahead and grabbed one.

 

[Solaris17]

My curiosity got the better of me, so I went ahead and grabbed one.

View attachment 375435

Sick! Let us know how it goes!

 

[sam_86314]

Sick! Let us know how it goes!

I definitely will.

Just gotta hope I'm tech-savvy enough to actually get it working.

It'll definitely be a learning experience, if nothing else.

 

[sepheronx]

My curiosity got the better of me, so I went ahead and grabbed one.

View attachment 375435

Which link? Care to share?

 

[sam_86314]

Which link? Care to share?

AMD BC-250 Mining GPU Card 16GB GDDR6 MEMORY | eBay

<p dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0;">Pulled from a working environment</p> <br> <p dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0;">This ASRock-mafr AMD BC-250 mining card has the same APU used in the PS5 and 16GB ram, making it a powerful tool for virtual currency mining. Its...

www.ebay.com

Get 'em quick before they sell out I guess.

 

[eidairaman1]

My curiosity got the better of me, so I went ahead and grabbed one.

View attachment 375435

As long as it isn't DOA

 

[Ruru]

Flashbacks when a cluster was made from playstations

I remember seeing some youtuber making a video of a PS3 which was used by US Air Force in a cluster.

 

[sam_86314]

I remember seeing some youtuber making a video of a PS3 which was used by US Air Force in a cluster.

PlayStation 3 cluster - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In November 2010, the Air Force Research Laboratory created a powerful supercomputer, nicknamed the "Condor Cluster", by connecting together 1,760 consoles with 168 GPUs and 84 coordinating servers in a parallel array capable of 500 trillion floating-point operations per second (500 TFLOPS).[22] As built, the Condor Cluster was the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world and was used to analyze high definition satellite imagery at a cost of only one tenth that of a traditional supercomputer.

 

[chrcoluk]

He probably is right about the PS3 game situation, $$$$.

FF13 series is still unplayable on a PS4 or PS5, it is on a Xbox Series or Xbox One, and of course PC.

 

[sepheronx]

AMD BC-250 Mining GPU Card 16GB GDDR6 MEMORY | eBay

<p dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0;">Pulled from a working environment</p> <br> <p dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0;">This ASRock-mafr AMD BC-250 mining card has the same APU used in the PS5 and 16GB ram, making it a powerful tool for virtual currency mining. Its...

www.ebay.com

Get 'em quick before they sell out I guess.

Crap, kinda expensive. It's like $40 just for shipping that thing.

 

[DaemonForce]

Saw this the other night and he's spot on. Literally no reason to pick these up but they're cheap. The expensive part other than shipping price is the headache.
It's allegedly a cut down PS5 restructured to close specs of my workstation when stripped out. Soooo effectively a R5 3600 with an RX 580.
The "not all games are perfectly playable" with bright rainbow lightmap glitching is exactly what I experience in VR when temps go over 65℃.
It is a symptom of bad vcore and cooling. The x2 rendering is garbage and tessellation goes kerchunk until you exit out of the game or reboot.

What he doesn't show is the super bizarre breakage and recovery of a preselected rigid body in the map where some kind of geometry is miscalculated,
Effectively breaking an entire portion of a 3D model. Imagine taking a random vertice of a model and repositioning it roughly ~600px in some random direction.
That's the best way I can describe the disfigurement. Of course if you see these for $50 and you can get the GPU h264 encoder to work with OBS, that's a streaming jackpot.
It's never going to happen.

 

[DirtyDingusMcgee]

ASRock AMD Crypto Mining Rig 4U12G - 12x AMD BC-250

$389 will get you 12 of them and the rest of the system. be fun to play with. Sure it's used mining equipment, but a cool toy no doubt. comes with 2 x 1200w psu.

 

[brandon99]

Ok, so just a theoretical:

The NVME drive is probably 4.0x4 since it is based off the ps5 right? What if you got a NVME to x16 slot GPU adapter and plugged a regular GPU (something like a Rx 6600) into this? Then, run the OS off a USB 3.0 port with an external SSD.

Probably could even get windows to run this way?

 

[DaemonForce]

I can get Windows to run from a USB chipdisk, so I'm not too concerned about getting it to work unlike video guy.
The entire issue is the MESA/RX6700 device itself and getting proper hardware detection and drivers working under NOT WinPE.
In short, it would be a headache. Is it within sight? Yes. Is it within reach? Probably not. We don't know.

 

[sam_86314]

It arrived...

I grabbed the PSU from my Razer Core X and a blower fan from a Dell Optiplex and got this janky setup going, duct tape and all.

Turned on the power, and it started outputting video. So far so good, so I rebooted and mashed delete...

Sweet, it can boot from USB. Plugged my Ventoy drive into it...

That was too easy. I selected my Windows to Go image to boot...

...and it booted into Windows with no issues (aside from no GPU drivers).

And there we go, the BC-250 booted into Windows 10. It has 6 cores, 12 threads, 16GB of memory (though only 4GB are usable), and an R7 2700X wipes the floor with it.

Interesting that it reports as an AMD 4700S. I mean, it's the same SoC, so not sure what else I would've expected.

One more pic of my janky setup after some small adjustments for good measure...

Next step is to put an NVMe drive in it and see how far I can get in Windows. Stay tuned...

 

[QuietBob]

What are the maximum clocks?
For reference, a stock 3300X does 536 ST and 2908 MT in CPU-Z with a 4.35 GHz and 4.2 GHz clock, respectively.

 

[sam_86314]

What are the maximum clocks?
For reference, a stock 3300X does 536 ST and 2908 MT in CPU-Z with a 4.35 GHz and 4.2 GHz clock, respectively.

It seems to go up to 3.5-3.6GHz.

 

[silentbogo]

That thing looks sweet. I'm wondering if it has virtualization enabled(or even available)? Cause the whole 12-piece rig would be perfect for running a ton of VMs.
A few months back I've seen a video on this thing at CraftComputing, but Jeff gave up pretty much as soon as he saw that GPU drivers aren't functional. I'm more interested in something like a bunch of bare VMs running Windows or Linux even without GPU acceleration.

 

[sam_86314]

That thing looks sweet. I'm wondering if it has virtualization enabled(or even available)? Cause the whole 12-piece rig would be perfect for running a ton of VMs.
A few months back I've seen a video on this thing at CraftComputing, but Jeff gave up pretty much as soon as he saw that GPU drivers aren't functional. I'm more interested in something like a bunch of bare VMs running Windows or Linux even without GPU acceleration.

There is an SVM option in the BIOS, I'll have to see if I actually enabled it or not.

Man, I wish I had the space for an entire rack of these just to screw around with.

EDIT: SVM is enabled in the BIOS, but Windows doesn't show virtualization as supported. Nevermind, Windows now shows virtualization as enabled.

Geekbench results:

GB6: 1143/5764

Default string AMD BC-250 - Geekbench

Benchmark results for a Default string AMD BC-250 with an AMD BC-250 processor.

browser.geekbench.com

GB5: 888/6271

Default string AMD BC-250 - Geekbench

Benchmark results for a Default string AMD BC-250 with an AMD BC-250 processor.

browser.geekbench.com

GB4: 4019/22888

Default string AMD BC-250 - Geekbench

Benchmark results for a Default string AMD BC-250 with an AMD BC-250 processor.

browser.geekbench.com

GB3: 3907/24933

Default string AMD BC-250 - Geekbench

Benchmark results for a Default string AMD BC-250 with an AMD BC-250 processor.

browser.geekbench.com

So basically, a Steam Deck with six cores (makes sense) or a tiny bit slower than an R5 2600X.

 

[QuietBob]

It seems to go up to 3.5-3.6GHz.

That would suggest the same boost clock as the PS5 SoC at 3.5 GHz and lower than the 4.0 GHz clock of the 4700S/4800S desktop kits based on the same hardware.

 

[eidairaman1]

Crap, kinda expensive. It's like $40 just for shipping that thing.

Someone is trying to make a profit on shipping