Ok it’s not exactly $60 but you can get the board itself for that amount of money on eBay if you’re lucky, but on average the price is around $70-$100 (as of November 2025) which is still very cheap considering you can play Cyberpunk 2077 on this.
The BC-250 began life not as a gaming board, but as part of a crypto-mining rig.
The “trick” behind it: the BC-250 uses a cut-down version of the APU from a PlayStation 5 (PS5) — a repurposed SoC (system-on-chip).
Specifically: many PS5 APUs that didn’t meet console spec (“binned” or “defective” for console use) got repurposed. Instead of being discarded, these chips were re-used for mining/higher-density hardware.
The original deployment: there was a rack-mount mining “server” build from ASRock that used 12 BC-250 cards, targeted at miners — sold as a “barebone” 4U server chassis.
As mainstream GPU mining lost favor, many BC-250 units started circulating second-hand — offering hardware enthusiasts an opportunity to experiment.
“BC-250 is basically a Playstation 5 chip that didn’t make the cut, and was released as a crypto-mining board.”
Key Specs & Hardware Details
From public teardowns, benchmarks, and community experiments, BC-250 hardware specs are roughly:
- CPU: 6 × Zen 2 cores (12 threads) — a cut-down PS5 APU.
- GPU / iGPU: RDNA 2 architecture, 24 Compute Units (CUs) — reduced from the 36 CUs of a full PS5 APU.
- Memory: 16 GB GDDR6 memory shared between CPU and GPU — there are no DDR4/DDR5 slots in a typical BC-250 board.
- I/O & connectivity: Even though it looks like a “GPU card,” it works as a single-board PC — includes DisplayPort, USB (2.0/3.0), Ethernet, M.2 NVMe slot (for storage), power header (8-pin PCIe), CMOS battery, and backplate I/O shield.
Performance benchmarks & real-world behavior
- Earlier reports suggested some instability with drivers, but recent community patches and updated drivers have improved support.
- Community tests showed surprising results: e.g. one test rig running BC-250 reportedly ran games like Cyberpunk 2077, GTA V, Counter-Strike 2, Hitman 3 — at playable framerates (not high-end, but enough for a budget build).
- Given enough power (cooling + PSUs) and tuning (BIOS tweaks, Linux driver config), some people report a gaming experience “close to an entry-level modern GPU.”
Here’s my real life Cyberpunk 2077 Benchmark:
How can you achieve this?
You have to get your hands dirty to achieve this — it’s not an out-of-the-box setup. You’ll need to perform both hardware and firmware modifications. Additionally, if you want it to look like the image above, that requires even more work.
Cooling
The BC-250 comes with a server-style closed finstack. It’s possible to use a blower fan to cool it, and there are even 3D-printed case designs that keep the original heatsink untouched (you’ll find these in my how-to repo linked below).
However, for good cooling performance, you’ll need to modify the finstack and open it up. This allows you to use one or two 120 mm fans for proper airflow. Be aware that this is a destructive modification — I’ve explained one method for doing it in the how-to repository.
Additionally, I refreshed the thermal pads and thermal paste for optimal cooling performance.
The unified memory
The BC-250 has 16 GB of unified memory, but by default it’s split between the CPU and GPU—typically 8 GB/8 GB (or in some cases 4 GB/12 GB). To use the device for gaming, you need to modify this and force a 512 MB allocation as VRAM. This may sound counterintuitive, but remember that this is an APU, not a traditional CPU/GPU setup.
To change these settings, the BIOS must be flashed to a custom 3.00 BIOS version that unlocks the Chipset configuration menu. This used to require an EEPROM programmer—at least according to documentation from about a year ago. Fortunately, there is now a bootable BIOS Flasher image that can handle the job much more easily.
OS
You can install Windows, but because this isn’t typical hardware, you won’t have proper graphics drivers. Most users run Arch-based Linux distributions instead. I went with Manjaro Linux, which works flawlessly. The Linux version of Steam works out of the box.
Case
You can find multiple designs online. I looked for compact cases that also enclose the PSU. I’ve built two versions: one is an ultra-portable format, and the other is more like a mini-PC.
This requires 3D printing and some DIY with the PSU.
