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ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine

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Re: ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine

#21
post #12

From the article: > MESSA_SHADER_CACHE_MAX_SIZE MESSA indeed.

At least we can be reasonably confident an LLM didn't write the article.

Chat bots now inject random typos on purpose to seem more believable.

Also, test phrases for paradox resolution are manually hard coded to hide the LLM blind spots for average users.

People would also troll on old chat platforms, but now they have Billions in loan capital to fund the irritating behavior. =3

Re: ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine

#22

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.

Yeah, too expensive now for what it is

Re: ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine

#24

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 befo…

Why not just replace the battery in your Steam Deck?

Re: ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine

#25

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 befo…

Why not just replace the battery in your Steam Deck?

Seriously, please don't throw away perfectly functioning hardware just to avoid unscrewing a few screws.

Re: ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine

#26
post #4

How well does HDMI CEC work on this?

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.

This is why the Steam Machine is worth its money (or, well, what it would have cost if RAM hadn't gone to the sky). Getting 90% of the nice-to-haves costs $200, but getting 100% costs $1000.

"It just works" is expensive.

Re: ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine

#27
> 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.

Re: ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine

#28

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 befo…

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

I have a 1660 super and I believe it is only a little less powerful than the ti. It definitely is not as powerful as a ps5. Though the original post is saying the bc250 is. I'm not sure which is correct!

Re: ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine

#29
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just replace the battery in your Steam Deck?

Seriously, please don't throw away perfectly functioning hardware just to avoid unscrewing a few screws.

Cries in my ongoing Apple Watch Series 6 battery replacement

Seriously, how close can you even put a screen and a metal casing?! Incredibly tiny gap that is impossible to jimmy open. I'm on day 3 trying to get this bastard open now...

Re: ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine

#30
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, please don't throw away perfectly functioning hardware just to avoid unscrewing a few screws.

Cries in my ongoing Apple Watch Series 6 battery replacement Seriously, how close can you even put a screen and a metal casing?! Incredibly tiny gap that is impossible to jimmy open. I'm on day 3 trying to get this bastard open now...

Yeah, it's a tragedy that we throw devices away because the battery has a short expiration date :/

At least I guess watches are on the more understandable end of the "hard to repair" continuum.

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