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The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)

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Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)

#21

Post by Brian_K_White »

kylec wrote: post #13
monster_truck wrote: post #11

You are _not_ getting one of these for less than $300, and because of this post and many like it, there are countless scams selling just cases for them at this price from a dollar or two of filament.

If it's advertised as a case and it works, why is it a scam? I don't own a 3D printer, nor do I know anyone who does. If someone is designing, printing, and selling a useful product, why is that a scam?

Automatically no 3d printed case is worth $300 because it's not possible to make it good enough quality.

A metal and wood case could be worth $300.

A good design is worth something, and a good printing job is worth something, and the convenience of a service is worth something, but no amount of good design and quality printing job and service convenience can make a 3d printed case worth more than about $50 before shipping, and it would need to be somehow pretty special design to overcome some basic material and process weaknesses and still be functional and look good to be worth that much.

Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)

#23

Post by MrDOS »

OptionX wrote: post #16

This isn't necessary related to this project but I got thinking about while reading it. Isn't it weird that shared memory was a cost saving measure by not having GPU dedicated has now been rechristened unified memory and is now a feature? I understand why the AI people want it to help with the latency between the CPU and GPU. But having people in some cases use it as for marketing is kinda like getting watered down b…

Technically, “unified memory” is where both the GPU and CPU have access to the RAM over the same bus, which is different from the older, reviled “shared memory”, where the RAM was always at least one bus hop away from the GPU. But yes, there is a certain amount of spin to it, isn't there? (“You have less total memory now, and that's a Good Thing!”)

Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)

#25

Post by tombardier »

nsbk wrote: post #17
tda wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it possible to build it for $60 when you built it though? As for the idle dray, a lot of PC's have Wake On Lan so you can power it on via a special IP packet. I could't get it to work on mine, so i pus an esp32 based power monitoring plug in front of it, and configured the PC to power on directly when powered. When the power monitoring sees the PC sleeping for some time, it cuts the power. I control the plug via…

No. I bought it for about 150 shipping included from Canada to Spain. I reckon I spent about 300$ in total, the most expensive thing being the 1Tb NVMe. I don't have an ethernet cable where the box is, so WoL is not an option for me either. I could have used something similar to your approach (very smart, by the way!) but decided to go ESP aiming for the most console-like experience of just grabbing the controller an…

WoWLAN is a thing. On my motherboard it works so well that it wakes up whenever my phone, laptop or steam deck connect to the WiFi, not just when I actually send the magic packets!

Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)

#27

Post by Aurornis »

OptionX wrote: post #16

This isn't necessary related to this project but I got thinking about while reading it. Isn't it weird that shared memory was a cost saving measure by not having GPU dedicated has now been rechristened unified memory and is now a feature? I understand why the AI people want it to help with the latency between the CPU and GPU. But having people in some cases use it as for marketing is kinda like getting watered down b…

> I understand why the AI people want it to help with the latency between the CPU and GPU.

The reason AI users like it is because it provides a large amount of higher-bandwidth memory at a price much lower than an equivalent GPU.

If you had 16GB of DDR5 in a normal 2-channel consumer board it would not be this fast.

This gives 16GB of high speed memory for a very low price compared to a full GPU.

The larger unified memory systems like Strix Halo or Apple Silicon provide access to high bandwidth memory at scales you can’t get with any consumer GPU.

> But having people in some cases use it as for marketing is kinda like getting watered down beer and getting told its a good thing because alcohol is bad for you

I don’t think you understand the benefits of having high speed memory attached at a low price point.

Yes we would all prefer to have the same amount of even faster memory attached to a dedicated GPU, but that’s not happening at this price point.

Better analogy would be that this is an entry-level sports car for the price of a Honda Civic but you’re complaining that it’s not a Lamborghini.

Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)

#28

Post by fc417fc802 »

OptionX wrote: post #16

This isn't necessary related to this project but I got thinking about while reading it. Isn't it weird that shared memory was a cost saving measure by not having GPU dedicated has now been rechristened unified memory and is now a feature? I understand why the AI people want it to help with the latency between the CPU and GPU. But having people in some cases use it as for marketing is kinda like getting watered down b…

> want it to help with the latency

Primarily the bottleneck actually. PCIe bandwidth is extremely limited.

GDDR has worse latency than DDR and scaling it up to larger capacities faces challenges. So if you unify memory your options are small GDDR, large DDR, or expensive HBM.

Unusually, the BC-250 and PS5 both use GDDR with the CPU so the memory bandwidth is great but the latency not so much AFAIK. It's like using a dGPU as a full computer.

Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)

#29

Post by AtomicSaboteur »

jrmg wrote: post #24

Is this the only piece of hardware that can be repurposed like this or are there other crypto mining (or AI?…) devices that have similar potential?

I actually got very interested in this sort of hardware repurposing, if someone know of any kind of place where people discuss and keep track of this, please share!

Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)

#30

Post by RajT88 »

$60 gaming PC's are doable if you buy an "untested" Dell Optiplex and get lucky. A few years ago, I bought a couple of these in that price range that not only worked, but had a GPU of some kind. Good enough for Left4Dead at least, and some other Indie games. All they needed was an HDD with Windows 10 (both of which I had lying around - Win10 licenses can be had for a few bucks).
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