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I 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 pressu
by nsbk 29d ago
I 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 silicon lottery and will depend on your specific board and you need to test everything thoroughly yourself, honing on a config that works for you.
The software side of things is Linux, so if you're familiar with setting it up it shouldn't be difficult to go through the different steps. There are a few distros that work well. I use Bazzite and boot directly to Steam big picture, the UX is great. You can exit to desktop and you have a fully usable Linux box that you can play around with from the comfort of your sofa.
One of the downsides is that it uses a lot of power when idling, about 80W. I just turn it off after using it. I'm working on a QOL feature: an ESP32-based power switch that starts the board when a specific BT device is detected (usually a controller). Once everything is setup the board works very nicely. It can be a bit loud depending on your fan/case combination. I'm currently printing this one[0]
It delivers about the same punch as a standard PS5. The hardware is remarkably similar, and much better than mini PCs set up with AMD APUs, unless you go Strix halo but that is another price league (10x). You can play Cyberpunk 2077 decently on it on settings similar to an AMD RX 6700XT or slightly below RTX 3070.
A pretty impressive number is the memory bandwidth at ~410 GB/s, which should run local LLMs like Gemma 4 or Qwen3.8 27B at decent speed but with limited context size as its just 16Gb
Would I build it again? It was a lot of fun, but financially is not a crazy deal if you need to buy all the materials and factor your time in. Still much cheaper than a Steam Box!
- [0] https://makerworld.com/en/models/3021754-bc250-case-mkuu-fsp-apevia-metalfish-psu#profileId-3395017 https://makerworld.com/en/models/3021754-bc250-case-mkuu-fsp...
Edit: GPU performance comparison
- tda 29d agoWas it possible to build it for $60 when you built it though? As for the idle dray, a lot of PC's have Wake On Lan so you can power it on via a special IP packet. I could't get it to work on mine, so i pus an esp32 based power monitoring plug in front of it, and configured the PC to power on directly when powered. When the power monitoring sees the PC sleeping for some time, it cuts the power. I control the plug via home assistant, so i can switch it on remotely
- nsbk 29d agoNo. I bought it for about 150 shipping included from Canada to Spain. I reckon I spent about 300$ 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 and playing your game
- tombardier 29d agoWoWLAN 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!
- nsbk 29d agoFirst time I hear about WoWLAN, thanks! I will check if it can work with my cheap usb Wifi adapter. Yours seems a bit too eager though! I wouldn't want the thing to start up every time I get home as it turns the projector on, which lowers the projector screen, which blocks the (small) apartment's main entrance when lowered and would make me enter home on my fours ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Krutonium 28d agoOn the other hand if you re-arranged the room, it'd be neat to walk in to everything deploying!
- tombardier 26d agoYeah it's not actually intentional; I have sunk a lot of time into trying to stop it happening. The firmware on my motherboard sucks; I couldn't even suspend it before the last bios update. Relatively new board.
- snadal 29d agoWould you mind to share here or by DM where you ordered items from? I’m in Spain and would like to build something similar. Thanks
- NooneAtAll3 29d ago> you still need ... DP to HDMI adapter what for? just use DP
- nsbk 29d agoIn my particular case the HDMI goes directly into a sound bar which does not have a DP input. I assume most people building a box like this will connect it to a TV, which is most commonly HDMI-only. So technically not a strong requirement but practically almost
- mplewis 28d agoMy monitor doesn't have a DisplayPort port.
- nfriedly 28d agoNot sure why you got downvoted for this - all but the cheapest monitors include DisplayPort because DisplayPort is both technically superior to HDMI and royalty-free. The only thing HDMI really has going for it TV's/home theater equipment. (And that's partially because most of the manufacturers are part of the HDMI forum, so they're the ones receiving the royalties that everyone else pays to use HDMI.)
- jauntywundrkind 29d agoI got one for $130 ~8-10 weeks ago. Whew. Lucky. The Steam Machine I think is part of why these things are now suddenly super in demand but also, yeah, it was a riotously good deal for a long time; thank you for this one good thing crypto. Just to note there are already over a half dozen esp32 based power controllers. The BT detect is cool. Reddit is at the "Yet Another esp32 controller" phase, has been for a while. (I'm not sure if yours is the first or not to do that, I think I've seen similar but maybe it was just yours I saw.) Bless you esp32. Thank you for actually having the obvious good thing, wireless, available for the world (and why did no one else deign do so?)! https://www.reddit.com/r/BC250Gaming/comments/1uylmj0/yet_another_esp32_power_controller_but_for_atx/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BC250Gaming/comments/1uylmj0/yet_an...
- nsbk 28d agoWell played! I guess we’ll never see such prices anymore. With regards to the wireless power on, I was definitely not the trail blazer. I’m just using https://github.com/Thunkar/bc250-esp32-switch https://github.com/Thunkar/bc250-esp32-switch
- bpye 28d agoAre there DP-HDMI adapters that work with HD audio bitstreaming and VRR? Different use case, but I've not had much luck finding good options.
- MegaDeKay 28d agoMight the UGreen adapter mentioned in this Reddit post do the trick? https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1pkdfcm/ugreen_knight_the_holy_grail_of_hdmi_21_dongles/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1pkdfcm/ugree... It was all the rage towards getting 4K 120 Hz VRR on Linux before AMD came along to contribute proper HDMI 2.1 support to the kernel. There is also mention in that thread of a CableMatters adapter that could be flashed with an alternate firmware but it wasn't as stable.
- teaearlgraycold 28d agoI 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.
- beacon294 28d agoYou can, it's kind of cool to have this capability on something gaming at such a low price tag. Its not optimal for your time but beats nothing by a LOT. And that model is pretty reliable. https://unsloth.ai/docs/basics/dynamic-3.0-ggufs https://unsloth.ai/docs/basics/dynamic-3.0-ggufs
- carlos_rpn 26d agoYou can run a 4bit Qwen3.8 27B on a 8GB GPU, though on my RX 6650 XT it will only reach about 3 tokens/s. If you can give the GPU units enough RAM to load the whole thing, it may be a little faster. I'm not sure why would you want to run something at 3-4 tokens/s though. At least try a MoE model. I get about 30 tokens/s from those.
- gambiting 28d agoWhy would the GPU context be limited to only 2GB?
- carter2099 19d agoWhat’s decent speed?