The Best Value Gaming PC I’ve Ever Seen

Okay, picture this. It's 2021. It's the height of the pandemic crypto boom. Computer silicon is worth more than gold. And AMD is just gonna throw away thousands of PlayStation 5 chips that don't meet Sony's strict requirements for performance and power consumption? I don't think so. And thus, the BC250 was born. This blade-style system on a board was originally created as a way to salvage semi-functional PS5 processors for large-scale cryptocurrency mining. But now that that's no longer profitable, these cast-off machines can be found easily for around 200 US dollars. And for that low price, you get just about everything you need for a fully-functioning gaming rig. Basic Ion cooling, a six-core AMD CPU, a decent 1080p-class GPU with support for hardware ray tracing, and, perhaps most importantly, 16 gigs of GDDR6 memory. Just add a fan, storage, and a decent power supply, and you're gaming, bud! What's the catch, Linus? Linus, what's the catch? What are you saying? I'm saying there is a catch, and I'll tell you after this segue to our sponsor. War Thunder. Take command of over 2,500 different tanks, planes, ships, and helicopters from 10 nations throughout history and present day. Play War Thunder for free on PC, console, or mobile using our links in the description. Probably the most important distinction is that while the BC250 uses PS5 Silicon, it is not a PS5. Sony's proprietary technology, including their system software and their hardware video encoding and decoding, are non-functional. Even the core system specs are actually substantially lower. I already mentioned a reduction from eight Zen 2 CPU cores to just six, but the GPU is cut down as well, from 36 compute units in the PS5 to just 24 in the BC250. But remember, guys, the PS5 targets upscaled 4K, so if we set our sights a little lower, there's a whole world of games that can run on this thing at 1080p high or, for older and lighter titles, even higher resolutions. Cyberpunk, for instance, manages around 50 to nearly 100 FPS, depending on the exact detail levels and whether you enable ray tracing, and Batman Arkham City was butter smooth for me at 1440p, absolutely cranked. As for Fortnite, what? Zero FPS? Fortnite's not that demanding, is it? No, it's not. But its implementation of kernel-level easy anti-cheat does demand that you run Windows, something the BC250 cannot do. That's gonna be gotcha number two. But there's good news. There's a growing community around these little machines that is dedicated to making everything easier, from creating 3D-printed enclosures and convenient power adapters to help spread the load across multiple connectors to creating software patches that improve performance and even writing detailed guides that help new users get started on the Linux distro of their choice. A more recent development is these convenient scripts that make the setup process a lot less intimidating and, maybe more importantly, make it easier to keep your operating system up to date without breaking any of the modifications that you might want to install. Modifications, you say? Yes, I do say. First up is the hackery to first boot your BC250 that is, in my opinion, necessary, like installing the modified BIOS that unlocks many additional parameters and then setting a less obnoxious fan control curve and fine-tuning your memory allocation. Just like the PS5, the BC250 has a single pool of RAM that is split between the CPU and the GPU. There are settings to fine-tune this split, but it's a little more complicated than just set and forget. Each setting indicates the minimum amount of RAM that is dedicated to the GPU and then, out of what remains, Linux, by default, can borrow up to half of that for the GPU as well. If all that sounds complicated, just set it to 512 megabytes and then aim for around seven-ish gigabytes maximum VRAM usage in your games. That'll give you about a gig of buffer room before your system will crash. Then you get into the fun stuff. Remember earlier when I said the CPU and GPU were cut down? What I really meant was locked down and it turns out that, in some cases, these cores can be unlocked to meaningfully enhance performance. We managed to not only increase the operating frequency of our chip to two gigahertz, but we also managed to get the full 40 CPUs of our GPU working. That's even more than a PlayStation 5. Let's game. Ah, the sweet sound of value. 40 FPS, not the most I've ever seen in Cyberpunk, but like, holy crap. This board is 200 bucks. Okay, let's go to a more reasonable 1080p. Man, with the unlocks, this thing is, flies. There she is. 1440p, medium, little bit of upscaling, solid 60 FPS. That is pretty freaking cool. As cool as that was, it's worth noting that silicon is usually discarded or repurposed for a reason. And even if you do manage to unlock your chip like we did, or some folks also get the missing CPU cores activated, there are likely to be consequences. We were lucky enough on both of our units that most of our consequences were thermal related. You probably noticed while I was gaming that our system is a little noisy. These two powerful Noctua industrial fans were necessary to keep this thing at barely safe temperatures. And that was outside of our cute little 3D printed enclosure here. As soon as we put this on it, those safe temperatures went out the window. Now backing off our frequency below two gigahertz would likely resolve this, but some enterprising users have gone the other route, Frankensteining power coolers or even water coolers onto their BC250s. Which raises the obvious question, is any of this worth the effort? I mean, there's no question the performance per dollar is there. A BC250 plus a $60 SSD and a doorstop power supply can be had for around $300 plus the cost of an operating system. But wait a minute, no windows support means no windows cost. So for about 300 bucks, that is untouchable value right there. But there are some issues and I'm gonna start with the smaller ones. The form factor, not the most convenient thing ever. I touched on 3D printed chassis options, but some folks just mount them in computer cases and then we'll either solder a front power button onto the rear one or just give their PC the old reach around whenever it's time to turn it on and off. Either of them takes a little bit of redneck ingenuity, but is not a big deal. Same goes for the lousy idle power consumption. Depending on which Linux distro you choose, this one is kind of solved, but these boards were not designed to sit around doing nothing, which could contribute to your power bill. The lack of hardware encoding and decoding is a bigger deal to me. This makes BC250s basically completely impractical for streaming and remote play using applications like Sunlight and Moonlight. It's really a shame because otherwise these would be very versatile and affordable thin clients. And another annoyance is that while standard USB means that you can kind of plug anything you want into it, as long as it's supported on your Linux distro, there's no onboard analog audio. So you're reliant on the audio stream that comes over display port, which would be fine if it wasn't kind of buggy on these. Remember guys, these were compute boards. So a high fidelity audio output wasn't exactly a priority. That means that depending on the cable you choose to plug in here, you might run into issues with the audio stream that's coming over display port. The one surefire fix is a USB DAC, but there's only so many ports on this thing and I don't recommend using USB DACs on a hub or splitter. Bringing us finally to the big issue. First is that these machines were almost certainly run hard and hot for their entire profitable lifespan. I mean, they were explicitly manufactured for crypto mining, a use case that is notoriously hard on every element of a system, especially the GPU memory. And the other big one, and this is the one that might doom BC250s to the hobbyist shadow realm forever is game compatibility. Some newer games require hardware features that this clunky sort of a PS5 chip doesn't support properly. And I encountered multiple instances of games that should work with Proton on Linux that just didn't, at least not for me anyway. But with that said, the community hasn't fully given up on those. In recent months, community development around these has moved at a rapid pace. And it wouldn't surprise me to see them become more performant, more compatible and more stable over time. The only thing to watch out for is that when things get easier, the price tends to go up. These used to be like around 50 bucks or something, weren't they? Like 70, 50, 70 bucks or something like that. Now they're up to 200. So if you've got the spare cash and this looks and sounds like a fun little project, I can wholeheartedly recommend BC250 modding. I mean, Lord knows the brand new hardware marketing, what's exciting for hobbyists right now. What is exciting though, is telling you about our sponsor. War Thunder, take command of over 2,500 tanks, planes, helicopters and ships of 10 major nations in one of the most comprehensive vehicle combat games. So if you've ever wanted to know what it's like to get behind the wheel of a 1920s fighter jet, now you don't need to take out that second mortgage because War Thunder is free on PC, consoles, mobile, as well as Mac and Linux. Immerse yourself in intense PVP battles where the war machines you control are modeled after their real world counterparts right down to the vroom, vroom sound the engines make. You're not gonna have a HUD cluttered with hit point boxes because War Thunder's combat is focused around piece by piece damage you're doing to enemy vehicles. The x-ray view allows you to see the intricate details of combat like where your shells penetrated other tanks and ships and what was damaged as a result. There's over 95 million players on War Thunder with a range of skills and game modes. So play War Thunder for free on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and mobile using the links below. And new to the game or returning after six months, you'll get a massive bonus pack on PC and consoles packed with vehicles, boosters, and more. Claim your bonus and start playing today. If you guys enjoyed this video, you might like the one we did recently or are about to do where we unlocked 56 gigabytes of hidden secret memory on another mining GPU. That was pretty cool.