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  • Hacker News
  • What case can I buy if I don’t have a 3D printer?
    by kelvinjps10
  • You can find 3d printed cases on eBay for $50. The BC-250 slides into one end and a fan goes in a funnel end, and boom, functional if a little odd in shape.
    by undersuit
  • You can buy most ATX (or derivative) cases and have an adapter bracket printed from services like JLPCB. Make sure the material is ABS or another high temperature plastic to resist heat warp.
    by tylerflick
  • How well does HDMI CEC work on this?
    by nsxwolf
  • Not at all
    by falcojr
  • It has no HDMI port. Some DP > HDMI adapters do CEC.
    by ThatPlayer
  • 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.

    by plug_world
  • wondering how is idle power after optimization
    by jimmydoe
  • 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.

    by plug_world
  • 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/

    by lucius_verus
  • Any fps measurements you can share? I'm also interested if you see a significant difference between CachyOS and Bazzite.
    by fatuna
  • > The script is hardcoded to read the stress binary at /usr/bin/stress since it doesn’t exist, the program errors out. To fix this, edit stress_helper.py.

    Script is good, but the directory is missing from PATH. The edited scripts hardcodes the path to the user's home. Earlier in the article, the binary was copied to ~/.local/bin/stress so the given code suggestion should not work either.

    by Sayrus
  • From the article:

    > MESSA_SHADER_CACHE_MAX_SIZE

    MESSA indeed.

    by doctorpangloss
  • At least we can be reasonably confident an LLM didn't write the article.
    by voxadam
  • I ran 20,000 of these boards for an eth mining operation. The interesting thing here is that this was right before AI happened the way it has and we couldn't find anything profitable for these after eth switched to PoS. Company shut down and everything was probably sold for pennies on the dollar (I have no idea). Now, these things are actually worth something and people are doing all sorts of wild things with them. Heck, I had no idea there were locked off CU's and we had all the inside information and contacts!

    I'm not saying that mining was a great industry or anything, I'm glad that eth switched to the much lower power usage option. I wish bitcoin would too. But, when people talk about the e-waste of the crypto mining industry... remember this one chip. One mans trash, is anothers treasure...

    by latchkey
  • Recent development has 2 / 8 of the CPU cores able to be unlocked too. Originally shipped with 6 CPU cores enabled.
    by ThatPlayer
  • 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.

    by saidinesh5
  • Nice, the bc-240 is around a GTX 1660 Ti GPU in performance, and some AAA RT eye candy games are less fun anyway... but many still work... so the VRAM requirements are not as big of an issue.

    People are figuring out what is playable on the platform, and it is a growing list:

    https://elektricm.github.io/amd-bc250-docs/gaming/compatibil...

    I was impressed Cyberpunk 2077 is on the list. ymmv =3

    by Joel_Mckay
  • Why not just replace the battery in your Steam Deck?
    by ThePowerOfFuet
  • The prices of these boards have gone up it seems since the knowledge on how to bring them up and effectively utilize them has proliferated.

    After the crypto miners dumped them (that was, what, 2 years ago?), I saw one of the entire rack systems on eBay- I think they held 12 of these in one rack on a common backplane - for $800. (or maybe less?)

    That's $66 per BC-250.

    by mk_stjames
  • Yeah, too expensive now for what it is
    by haunter
  • It was a box of 12 and 6 shared one of 2 PSUs in the box. Each board was effectively an independent "server".
    by latchkey
  • Right now the same situation happens with CMP 170HX.

    These GPUs physically have 64GB RAM but locked to 8GB RAM. You can unlock all 64GB RAM with a patched driver.

    They used to cost $200-250 but now cost $700+.

    by ValdikSS
  • I bought a full rack for $240 (free shipping) Thanksgiving day 2024 - got lucky!
    by kersny
  • Support for the board is also way better than before. Now you can customize RAM assigned to cpu/gpu, idle power, in some cases unlock cores, distros work out of the box, etc.

    And the alternative of getting a gpu, cpu, ram, storage is like 5 times as expensive.

    by PowerElectronix
  • I checked eBay and they are now around 200 usd and up. All the sellers located in the US and Canada, so a bit more involved for hackers looking into building one from Europe. I still pulled the trigger on one, not sure I will use it much but I'm definitely gonna have a lot of fun building it!
    by nsbk
  • The fan comparisons are interesting. Seems like CFM is the 'peak performance' limiter here, and the P12 specializes in dumping way more RPM/CFM/dBa than the Noctua. The case fan I have, Silent Wings Pro 4, in 120mm goes up to 80CFM with even more dBa at max. There are many more!

    https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/175/

    https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/4/

    https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/101/

    Note that if you alter the 3d case print to wedge a 120mm x 30mm fan into it, as opposed to Noctua's 120mm x 25mm, then you can fit the Phanteks T30-120 which hits 105CFM at 43.6dBa, beating the P12 by a solid +30CFM for +4dBa. Its fan noise is described as 'pleasant white noise', as opposed to the jet engine crying baby hell whine that anyone who's booted an HP ProLiant can describe:

    > the Arctics actually left HDD temps 1˚C worse than the Phanteks when run at the same speed (around 2,200 RPM) and were significantly louder even at that speed. It wasn't just volume, but their pitch was similar to the 80mm server fans I had tried previously - the kind of sound that echoes throughout my house. By comparison, the Phanteks sound like pleasant white noise, not purely the sound of whooshing but very much like it - and they're virtually silent when run closer to 1500 RPM.

    — https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1jpl1g0/quieting_a...

    by altairprime