ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by bzzzt » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #33

embedding-shape wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly does suck, imagine the waste... To be fair to the average person though, we're a far away from when you could just pop open the back casing of the phone and switch the battery with your bare hands, no wonder people are afraid of doing these things themselves. I'm fearing the day my waterproof bone conduction headphones have poor battery health, changing the battery on that will be a whole 'nother challenge.

Yeah, anything waterproof is going to be a problem. I'm curious to see how the new EU laws on battery replacement deal with this.

The EU battery replacement laws do not apply to waterproof devices.

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

#52

Post by BizarroLand » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 6:25 PM UTC

ValdikSS wrote: post #48

mk_stjames wrote: post #17

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.

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+.

That's not exactly true, they can be "unlocked" but not many people have tested and verified that the unlocked memory is stable and/or useful.

But the cards themselves are extremely limited in function, necessitating either board level work to reconnect the electrically disconnected traces or transplanting the hardware to a new board. It's anything but plug and play.

https://niconiconi.neocities.org/tech-notes/nvidia-cmp-170hx...

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

#53

Post by BurnGpuBurn » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 8:05 PM UTC

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #20

saidinesh5 wrote: post #15

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 am often impressed the potatoes Cyberpunk will run on. Even runs on my retro i3-4130 with GTX 1050 Ti box.