ASRock BC-250: Building the Budget Steam Machine
plug-world.com89 points by plug_world 13 hours ago
89 points by plug_world 13 hours ago
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...
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.
Why not just replace the battery in your Steam Deck?
I intend to.
They don't sell steam deck/it's parts where I live. So the next time people visit me from far away, they'd have to bring one along.
That being said, steam deck isn't as powerful to play some of the games like Spider-Man 2. The stuttering is quite high on that.
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.
Looking at you Withings. My perfectly able and capable Steel HR needs to be binned and repurchased (quite hefty price too) after 8yrs of good use as now the battery lasts only 3 days. Tried to contact them to swap the battery (at a cost) they suggested the only option is the bin... 8yrs is definitely more than an Apple Watch probably, but way less than the Zenith my father wore for more than 30 years.
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.
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!
It is a silicon lottery if the hidden BC-240 cores are stable when unlocked.
Almost ps5 level, but not quite... still a lot cheaper than a GPU these days, and the discounted racks came with NVMe ssd on each BC-240 as well. =3
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.
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!
What case can I buy if I don’t have a 3D printer?
> 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.
Recent development has 2 / 8 of the CPU cores able to be unlocked too. Originally shipped with 6 CPU cores enabled.
Any fps measurements you can share? I'm also interested if you see a significant difference between CachyOS and Bazzite.
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
wondering how is idle power after optimization
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/
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.
I would absolutely not buy assuming this. People used to work hard to get 70W at the socket idle. Things have gotten better, much better, but at the socket those sound like miracle numbers.
Those absolutely are miracle numbers and don’t seem remotely accurate. What does the wall report?
I remember people were saying this IDLES at like 80w wall, I’m sure it’s been optimised, but 35w at load is super unlikely
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.
I just added CEC to mine today by soldering some wires to my DP-to-HDMI adapter and having Claude write some firmware to run on a Pi Pico to inject the CEC messages at the right time.
It's not the most elegant solution but felt in the spirit of the whole BC-250 experience.
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.
This is the finest advertisement for buying a genuine Steam Machine that I have ever seen.
You can put SteamOS on any hardware. Your old gaming desktop, a mini PC, weird crypto mining hardware - it's all a testement to how flexible Proton is.
This project is pretty involved, but by no means is it the easiest alternative.