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

[sam_86314]

I've got some ideas for custom cooling. I'm going to try to design an adapter to mount my old Cryorig R1 onto it.

I'll figure out VRM cooling later.

I took some measurements for the mounting holes in the board and the mounts for the cooler. The hole spacing in the board is 95mm, and I initially measured the cooler mount spacing at 71mm.

Then, I threw together a design for a mounting bracket.

Once I got that done, I dug my 3D printer out from the pile of crap that accumulated on top of it and put it to work.

Here's the first prototype.

I absolutely nailed the board hole spacing...
I know that's a disgusting amount of thermal paste, but better to be safe than sorry with a bare die.

...but the cooler mounting hole spacing was just barely off.

I suspect it's supposed to be 72mm instead of 71mm. I'm gonna redesign it and try again.

EDIT: I redesigned it from scratch to do it a bit cleaner this time.

Reprinted it, and...

...it fits nearly perfectly. Now, to get one made from metal, and then I can tackle all of the other challenges relating to mounting height, pressure, etc.

 

[Avru]

wouldnt it be better to use GPU cooler ?
It would be quite fragile with such arm

 

[nightdeploy]

View attachment 380256

Also got small cluster, sadly there where only one seller in eu. Lucky US could get them dirt cheap, would buy few clusters

I've been looking to get one of these in the EU. Do you happen to still have the link to where you purchased yours?

 

[Avru]

I've been looking to get one of these in the EU. Do you happen to still have the link to where you purchased yours?

NEW AMD BC-250 Crypto Mining GPU & CPU, PlayStation 5 APU, 16GB GDDR6 PS5 APU | eBay

NEW AMD BC-250 Crypto Mining GPU & CPU, PlayStation 5 APU, 16GB GDDR6 PS5 APU | Computer, Tablets & Netzwerk, Computer-Komponenten & -Teile, Grafik-/Videokarten | eBay!

www.ebay.pl

but they had only single cluster (12pc), it where there for like a 2 month.
Shipped from SK for free, within 2days.

Considered buying whole rig from USA, it would be cheaper even with this insane shipping, but TAXes would probably kick-in and kill whole business.

When i bought it i didnt know it would work so well, at worst case scenario I wanted to desolder GDDRs for repairs as they where dirt cheap couting only those chips.

 

[nightdeploy]

NEW AMD BC-250 Crypto Mining GPU & CPU, PlayStation 5 APU, 16GB GDDR6 PS5 APU | eBay

NEW AMD BC-250 Crypto Mining GPU & CPU, PlayStation 5 APU, 16GB GDDR6 PS5 APU | Computer, Tablets & Netzwerk, Computer-Komponenten & -Teile, Grafik-/Videokarten | eBay!

www.ebay.pl

but they had only single cluster (12pc), it where there for like a 2 month.
Shipped from SK for free, within 2days.

Considered buying whole rig from USA, it would be cheaper even with this insane shipping, but TAXes would probably kick-in and kill whole business.

When i bought it i didnt know it would work so well, at worst case scenario I wanted to desolder GDDRs for repairs as they where dirt cheap couting only those chips.

Manage to find and buy one for 70 euro's + shipping. Now i'm waiting for it to be delivered. Wondering if the blower fan you are using is 12 or 24 v.

 

[sam_86314]

Manage to find and buy one for 70 euro's + shipping. Now i'm waiting for it to be delivered. Wondering if the blower fan you are using is 12 or 24 v.

I know this wasn't aimed at me, but the blower fan I'm using is 12v and spins up to like 4400RPM. It's from a Dell Optiplex.

It looks like @Avru might also be using Optiplex fans.

Have you managed to get ROCm running on a single one?

I have five of these coming sometime next week. Rocm is the first thing I'm planning to tackle if no-one has gotten it by then. Would love to help out!

I'll also add that I did finally try ROCm (GPU accelerated rendering in Blender using HIP), and sure enough, it causes an unrecoverable GPU reset. Only solution that I know of is to do a hard reboot.

 

[eidairaman1]

I know this wasn't aimed at me, but the blower fan I'm using is 12v and spins up to like 4400RPM.




I'll also add that I did finally try ROCm (GPU accelerated rendering in Blender using HIP), and sure enough, it causes an unrecoverable GPU reset. Only solution that I know of is to do a hard reboot.

Can you even report your findings to
AMD with that hardware you are using?

 

[nightdeploy]

I know this wasn't aimed at me, but the blower fan I'm using is 12v and spins up to like 4400RPM.




I'll also add that I did finally try ROCm (GPU accelerated rendering in Blender using HIP), and sure enough, it causes an unrecoverable GPU reset. Only solution that I know of is to do a hard reboot.

Thank you.

 

[Avru]

yep, COOLER DELL OPTIPLEX 390 790 990 3010 7010 9010 SFF CN-0J50GH CN-0637NC,
they cost less than a beer ;p
Had some other blowers earlier, but they got so shitty quality, better to buy some used orginals.

just swaped wires and cuted it abit, works with PWM.
Now got bunch of radiators

@nightdeploy where did you find ?

 

[nightdeploy]

yep, COOLER DELL OPTIPLEX 390 790 990 3010 7010 9010 SFF CN-0J50GH CN-0637NC,
they cost less than a beer ;p
Had some other blowers earlier, but they got so shitty quality, better to buy some used orginals.

just swaped wires and cuted it abit, works with PWM.
Now got bunch of radiators

@nightdeploy where did you find ?

Found someone on ebay that was shipping internationally. He currently has none left in stock.

 

[angrymark]

Hello to everyone! I registered there just to say: let me be welcomed to the club

Ordered today this wonderful hardware, I'm thrilled to make myself an powerful mini-pc.

Thanks for all information, hope that in the future there will be more possibilities to unlock the potential of this thing.

 

[nightdeploy]

Hello to everyone! I registered there just to say: let me be welcomed to the club

Ordered today this wonderful hardware, I'm thrilled to make myself an powerful mini-pc.

Thanks for all information, hope that in the future there will be more possibilities to unlock the potential of this thing.

Nice.

What a luxury ordering from europe i have to wait untill february to get mine delivered

 

[redundantly]

I ordered a 12 bay unit, it is arriving tomorrow. I plan to use it as a space heater by doing some mining. Once things warm up I'll be looking at turning it into a 12-seater gaming system, then next winter it can be a space heater again

I don't have anything substantial to add yet, just commenting as I plan to follow this thread until I do.

 

[Canned Noodles]

Once things warm up I'll be looking at turning it into a 12-seater gaming system, then next winter it can be a space heater again

You could throw a helluva LAN party with that - please do update when the time comes

 

[smig0l]

Sorry don't want to clutter this thread but
I find only 90$ (plus 90$ shipping and ??$ customs) on ebay from US and such sellers.
wondering if anyone from EU has a card to sell for a decent price (I am located in Italy).



Edit - post approved by moderator.

 

[the54thvoid]

Sorry don't want to clutter this thread but
I find only 90$ (plus 90$ shipping and ??$ customs) on ebay from US and such sellers.
wondering if anyone from EU has a card to sell for a decent price (I am located in Italy).

Normally, these requests are made in the B/S/T thread, but I'll allow this here in context with the ongoing discussion.

 

[nightdeploy]

Sorry don't want to clutter this thread but
I find only 90$ (plus 90$ shipping and ??$ customs) on ebay from US and such sellers.
wondering if anyone from EU has a card to sell for a decent price (I am located in Italy).



Edit - post approved by moderator.

The person i bought them from has some more in stock it comes down to 58 USD + shipping.

 

[redundantly]

I got it a week and a half ago. One of the blades is bad, the seller has shipped a replacement.

I installed shrouds on the blades, installed noctua fans and reversed the air flow, and taped off some of the rear vents. The noctua are too slow, so the boards are constantly running at 99°C on edge, being throttled, so I'm currently only running half of the blades.

I also bought a bunch of used m.2 SSDs to use in them, about $5 per SSD, they're working perfectly.

These are definitely finicky systems. It took a bit of effort to find a stable Ubuntu configuration, but I was unable to get mining working we well as I wanted, so I loaded mmpOS for the short term until I can get a good, working config with plain Ubuntu.

I'll be replacing the Noctua fans with faster, but still fairly quiet ones, and I need to flash a new bios image that has power optimizations, so will be looking into that.

When I've got my new space heater working the way I want, I may use one of the blades and start working on a gaming set up on it.

 

[Veseleil]

View attachment 384510

I got it a week and a half ago. One of the blades is bad, the seller has shipped a replacement.

I installed shrouds on the blades, installed noctua fans and reversed the air flow, and taped off some of the rear vents. The noctua are too slow, so the boards are constantly running at 99°C on edge, being throttled, so I'm currently only running half of the blades.

I also bought a bunch of used m.2 SSDs to use in them, about $5 per SSD, they're working perfectly.

These are definitely finicky systems. It took a bit of effort to find a stable Ubuntu configuration, but I was unable to get mining working we well as I wanted, so I loaded mmpOS for the short term until I can get a good, working config with plain Ubuntu.

I'll be replacing the Noctua fans with faster, but still fairly quiet ones, and I need to flash a new bios image that has power optimizations, so will be looking into that.

When I've got my new space heater working the way I want, I may use one of the blades and start working on a gaming set up on it.

To cool that thing properly you'll need very fast and loud server grade fans.

 

[redundantly]

To cool that thing properly you'll need very fast and loud server grade fans.

Aye. I had read or watched somewhere that someone used Noctua, but I don't recall if that was for a full chassis or single card set up. Figured I'd give it a try and note the results.

 

[_sporksinjected_]

Aren't you using AMDGPU with it?

I was really surprised but rocm just installs with a few dnf packages. You can use this guide to get things working on Fedora https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/HC#Installation

You'll have to install all the development packages for rocm and hip, the guide mentions one of those.

Currently, rocm works but vram isn't recognized. You can use llamacpp with `-DGGML_HIP_UMA=ON` to make things work but it's really slow. Maybe half the speed of Vulkan. Also make sure to set the target as gfx1013.

 

[elik3]

I was really surprised but rocm just installs with a few dnf packages. You can use this guide to get things working on Fedora https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/HC#Installation

You'll have to install all the development packages for rocm and hip, the guide mentions one of those.

Currently, rocm works but vram isn't recognized. You can use llamacpp with `-DGGML_HIP_UMA=ON` to make things work but it's really slow. Maybe half the speed of Vulkan. Also make sure to set the target as gfx1013.

Are you sure llama.cpp wasn't running on CPU? I actually spent a fair bit of time trying to get ROCm compute on the bc250 working both with llama.cpp and vLLM and wasn't able to get anything to run correctly either time...

With llama.cpp I built the whole ROCm dev stack for gfx1010 (wasn't able to build for gfx1013 but gfx1010 is a subset of it) and then compiled/ran llama.cpp with HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION="10.1.0" to emulate a gfx1010... and it did generate tokens but produced gibberish output 100% of the time. I actually had to tweak some of the code for llama.cpp's ggml-hip allocation logic to get it to see the whole VRAM, as for some reason the default UMA ("managed") allocator would only see like 2GB instead of the full 12.... was really hacky though so very possible that broke something else. But it was seemingly, close to working, at least.

With vLLM I had similar luck - built their base ROCm dependencies container image for gfx1010 (with some tweaking to their Dockerfiles and cmake scripts), then built the application container on top of that image, and it booted up and loaded the model but hit a GPU hang immediately afterwards which completely locked up the system. Which tracks with what some other folks were saying about GPU lockups earlier in this thread.

Vulkan, on the other hand, works plenty fine for inference - was able to run some quantized 7B models in llama.cpp at around ~60tok/sec which is not terrible, little bit worse than my 3070. And was able to do distributed inference across 4 BC250s with their RPC backend.. but for some reason, Vulkan only sees 10 out of the full 12GB of VRAM, haven't tracked down why yet. Unfortunately vLLM which has a better and seemingly much more robust distributed inference backend would require us to get ROCm working... as PyTorch got rid of its Vulkan support a couple years back....

In other words, if you have some trick to getting ROCm compute working on the bc250, definitely let us know maybe if you could detail your whole environment setup it could be useful

 

[Avru]

dunno what lm studio uses, but there was alot of difference between cpu interference (still better on bc250 compared to 5800x3d, gddr does the job) and gpu offload. Still gpu offload was a bit worse than my 2060..