building my diy steam machine - Part 1
i took a chance on an amd bc-250 from aliexpress for under au$200 delivered. seven days later, a surprisingly well-packed piece of extremely questionable amd hardware landed on my desk.
building my diy steam machine
a few days before christmas, i ended up unboxing an ASRock AMD BC-250 — one of the stranger pieces of hardware i’ve bought in a while.
late in 2025, the bc-250 started quietly circulating through:
- pc forums
- linux communities
- budget builder groups
- and the specific type of people who see abandoned mining hardware and think:
“i can probably turn that into something useful.”
because underneath all the crypto-mining weirdness is something genuinely interesting:
a cut-down ps5-derived amd apu being repurposed into a diy pc platform.
naturally, i wanted one.
price & shipping
i ordered the board from aliexpress on december 16, 2025 for around au$197 delivered.
for hardware this weird—and increasingly hard to find locally—that felt reasonable enough to justify the gamble.
especially compared to ebay pricing, where people seem to price rare hardware based entirely on optimism.
to my surprise, shipping was fast.
ordered december 16. arrived december 23.
which honestly felt suspiciously efficient for aliexpress.
first impressions
the packaging was actually good.
lots of foam, bubble wrap, anti-static protection— everything arrived intact with no bent fins, damaged traces, or obvious signs of abuse.
which already put this above some locally shipped marketplace purchases i really don’t want to deal with.
seeing the board in person feels strange because it doesn’t really fit into a normal pc category.
it’s not quite:
- a gpu
- a motherboard
- or a mini pc
it’s basically:
recycled console-adjacent mining hardware pretending to be a desktop platform.
and honestly, that’s part of why it’s interesting.
what actually is the bc-250?
the bc-250 is built around a ps5-derived amd apu:
- zen 2 cpu cores
- rdna 2 graphics
- 16gb of shared gddr6 memory
which makes it weirdly capable for something originally designed for mining workloads.
the board itself is very non-standard:
- passive cooling
- server-style layout
- displayport output
- external power requirements
- and basically zero expectation that normal consumers would ever use it like this
so naturally, people started turning it into gaming pcs.
getting it running properly outside of its original mining environment still takes some effort though:
- power delivery quirks
- cooling
- linux compatibility
- custom setups
- and a fair amount of trial and error
which is probably why i like it.
the plan
the current goal is to turn this into a small diy steam machine / linux gaming box.
next steps are probably:
- testing linux compatibility properly
- figuring out thermals
- building a custom case
- benchmarking
- and seeing how far this weird thing can actually go
realistically, half the fun here is just making unconventional hardware do something it probably wasn’t meant to do.
final thoughts
for under au$200 delivered, the bc-250 feels less like:
“a sensible purchase”
and more like:
“an engineering curiosity that accidentally became affordable.”
it’s weird hardware. slightly impractical. probably unnecessary.
which usually means it’ll be fun.
part 2 will probably involve:
- getting parts to power the thing properly
- figuring out cooling solutions
- linux struggles