Love these articles. Need a little more cash, a little more time. A little drop in ram prices...
The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
81–90 of 111 posts
Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
#82If one were to actually build and design a SoC, ARM $60 game “console” that plugs into your TV in 2026 and sell it at a decent volume, what would the equivalent game console be potential-wise? I’ve been doing 3D game development for retro consoles for fun and it’s actually quite impressive what you can actually achieve with little hardware.
Not $60, but a bit close. I'd do something based on the RK3588 SoC. It's pretty beefy. GPU isn't stellar but it does have good video codec, a proper PCIe bus including support for e.g. m.2 slot nVME on many boards, and decent amounts of RAM, and good a multicore basis.
And there's some amount of kernel upstreaming that makes it a bit friendlier than some.
Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
#83How could I have found out about these machines months ago before the price went up? Where do I have to browse and connect around?
You hang out on weird hardware hacker forums and spot what people are working on. You can try buying the things multiple people are working on and getting good early results on. But most of it will end up being ewaste.
Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
#84$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).
As long as you only want to play games from 2008. :)
I'm in!
Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
#85I built one of these. It is not possible to do so for 60$ anymore since the board itself goes for 150+. On top of that you still need a PSU, NVMe, a high pressure fan, DP to HDMI adapter, possibly BT and Wifi adapters, and a 3d-printed or DIY case. It is also a very hacky build. You need to flash the BIOS which enables a few interesting unlocks: from 24 to 40 GPU compute units and 6 to 8 CPU cores. It's a bit of a si…
I don’t see how you could run Qwen3.8 27B on 16GB of memory that’s shared with Linux. Are people running models at 2bit quants? Are they even worth bothering with? I had assumed you go down to 4bit and if you need to go smaller you have to lose parameters.
Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
#86I have a bunch of these as headless gaming PCs in a rack running sunshine and Steam on Linux. The kids stream from them using moonlight on whatever smart device they want to play on. Had the idea from LTT but he went a bit bonkers and bought expensive hardware to transmit video and input over cables. Gigabit Ethernet is more than enough.
Is that just with software encoding? Or did hardware encoding get fixed?
Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
#87$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).
> $60 gaming PC's are doable if you buy an "untested" Dell Optiplex and get lucky.
Yeah, but a $60 lottery ticket that pays off in an X if you win isn’t a $60 X.
Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
#88[dead]
Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
#89For anyone wondering about local LLM applications:
- current price $200+
- limited VRAM (12-14 GB)
- poor performamce in clusters [1] - only 2 lanes of PCI-e 2.0 (still better than CMP XX HX mining cards)
[1] https://ciroluciotecce.it/en/posts/bc250-cluster-inferenza-l...
Re: The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
#90You 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.
This always makes me ambivalent about enthusiast blog posts. Like on the one hand, cool that the knowledge gets spread. On the other hand, whenever one gets popular, another hidden gem skyrockets in price or becomes semi-permanently low in stock.
The invisible hand of the market finger-blasting our wallets again.