Small, Hot, Plays Elden Ring at 60FPS...
Ok, this is exciting.
For $160 CAD, (taxes and shipping included) I was able to purchase a BC-250; if you do a quick search on it, you’ll see that it’s essentially a cut-down Playstation 5 APU that was purposed for crypto mining.
It comes with the following:
- 6, Zen 2 CPU cores; up to 3.49GHz give or take
- 24CU (compute units) RDNA2 iGPU apparently codenamed ‘Cyan-Skillfish’
- 1x M.2 2280 slot with support for NVMe (PCIe 2.0 x2) and SATA 3
- 1x DisplayPort,
- 1x GbE Ethernet,
- 2x USB 2.0,
- 2x USB 3.0
- 1x SPI header,
- 1x auto-start jumper,
- 1x clear CMOS jumper,
- 5x fans (non-standard connector),
- 1x TPM header
- NCT6686 SuperIO chip
And, if you’re like me you maybe even saw this thing floating around on Ebay while you were browsing for used video cards..
The real hook – for me anyways – is when I saw a recommended youtube video showcase what this thing can do with:
- A little bit of tinkering
- A little bit of patience
- Some help from the discord community
- a modest budget for peripherals and this and that
Like I said, I found this for $160.00 all in on an Ebay listing; the seller from Northern Ontario (so no worry about tariffs or Duty; bunch of doody if you ask me) had a bunch available for $129.00 CAD with maybe $14.00 Shipping, I ordered one and the next thing you know (2 days later) it’s in my mailbox.
And again, I only pulled the trigger on this thing because of this guy:
The video showcases that this thing can run Steam games, using PROTON v.x.x and producing framerates of a system running a Ryzen 5 2600 paired with an RX6600. So, for $129.00 CAD on an ebay listing, it was very, very easy to say “yes”, and “how soon can it arrive?”.
After pulling the trigger on that buy-it-now listing: https://www.ebay.ca/itm/267238260902
However, peeking at that SOC today, the thing costs $169 CAD (as of Nov 20th, 2025) so clearly, buddy’s youtube video above is influencing the market value.. Order our Canadian Dollar is; I can’t decide!
Once this thing arrived and I unpackaged it, I started to survey what was needed next, went to my local Canada Computers and picked up the following:
- 1x Kingston DataTraveler Exodia M 64GB USB Type-A USB 3.2
- 2x be quiet! PURE WINGS 3 120mm PWM Case Fan’s
- 1x AZZA PSAZ-650W ATX Gaming Power Supply – 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified
which came to about $100 CAD
Already on-hand I had:
- 1x Western Digital BLUE NVME (SN570)
- Old, TP-LINK USB wifi dongle
- A monitor to get video via Display Port onto.
- A Display Port cable
- My favorite Keyboard and Mouse
- Some spare wood, screws, glue, various tools that I would need to craft a quick test bench onto.
The first thing I did was build the test bench.
Then, I needed to decide which Linux distro I was going to use for this thing – I chose Bazzite Linux, Desktop version from https://bazzite.gg and chose the following options from it’s download form:
- What hardware are you using? Desktop
- Who is the vendor of your primary GPU? AMD (RX 4xx+ | AI)
- What desktop environment do you prefer? GNOME
- Do you want Steam Gaming Mode? No – Desktop
That got me a link to then download the bassite-gnome LIVE ISO: https://download.bazzite.gg/bazzite-gnome-stable-live.iso
Where I could download the ISO and move onto the next step: Creating a bootable USB via RUFUS.
Once I had the Bazzite Image ready to go on my new 64GB USB (they don’t sell USB sticks smaller than this anymore btw!) It was time to prepare the BC-250, slap in that NVME storage, screw it down and then power the thing up with a Keyboard and Mouse + the bootable USB plugged in (I chose a usb 3.x slot).
Unfortunately… My first Boot was non-eventful. After having the 8pin PCI-E connector plugged into this thing and trying all sorts of button press combinations to get it to power on, I then remembered: The 24pin PSU molex isn’t connected to anything; there is no pin-ON, no way for the PSU to know it has to be turned on. And that’s when the Jankyness started.
As it turns out, you can jump-start your PSU by safely connecting something conductive on pin 4 and 6 on the 24pin molex. And while that works – I caution you to be carefuly doing this, especially if your 24pin is completely black with no way to look for the “Green” wire – this is the PSU ON wire on other PSU’s, and you typically connect it to GROUND (black) to signal to the PSU that it’s needed, and to get to work. The good thing, is that this “Green” wire will always be pin 4, or the pin that’s 4th, counting from the extreme right of the molex connector, counting left – holding the molex pinout in front of you, facing up with the safety clip facing you.
Anyways, after getting that figured out, I switched the PSU switch AND……….
Yeah, the unit was powering off, and on rapidly and I was worried the card or powersupply was defective. It took me a little bit of time after that episode – and a few more like it to realize the connection I had between pin 4 and 6 on the PSU’s 24pin were too loose. And I permanently fixed this problem by upgrading to a more elegant, yet still janky solution:
This is a sturdy, PSU-ON jumper. Highly recommended. I’ve also seen some people use versions of this that have a connected on switch with a bit of cable length so you can effectively have an on-off button for your BC-250, but I chose against it since I will just use the PSU on/off switch to handle my power state.
Once I had everything stable, I was able to install and boot into Bazzite with absolutely no issues. Everything just “Worked” which was very relieving. And when I checked Bazzites “About” feature to see what the OS saw as hardware, I was pleasantly suprised to see:
But, more work was still to be done.
- Install Steam
- Install Games
- Test Games
- Test Thermals
- Add more Apps
- Create this blog post!
And so I began in the order I shared above, but not without several challenges, the first being how to navigate a Fedora based Linux Distro that uses it’s own package manager – but on top of that – is immutable, so things you install are layered – truly fascinating stuff btw.
To save you where I failed. If you’re actually going to buy and set one of these things up, or you did buy it and you’re looking on what to do first after having the distro installed I’m going to say (and if you joined the Discord, they’re going to say):
- Install the Governor – this manages your GPU state from what I understand, and results in much, much better temperatures – like temperaturs in the 50deg C range at idle usage, with something like 37 – 40 watts draw. Without that, or even with using the wrong Governor (like Oberon Governor) you will see idle temperatures at like 70 degrees Celsius. Scary shit. So, if you happen to be using Bazzite, copy and paste this command:
sudo dnf copr enable filippor/bazzite sudo rpm-ostree install cyan-skillfish-governor sudo reboot
If you already installed the oberon governor, like I did then you’re going to have to stop and disable that before enabling your new ‘cyan-skillfish-governor’:
sudo systemctl stop oberon-governor sudo systemctl disable oberon-governor
Regardless though, to enable the new governor after you’ve rebooted, simply run:
sudo systemctl enable --now cyan-skillfish-governor
To give you an idea of what your power and temperature savings are after doing this, check this out:
Getting some kind of hardware monitor on this thing, I found, used and continue to enjoy CoolerControl. If by chance you want it too, then do:
ujust install-coolercontrol systemctl reboot sudo systemctl enable --now coolercontrold
Next comes some custom Bios that you’re going to need if you want to get decent performance out of this defective PS5. Someone in the Discord channel described it perfectly, that the BC-250 is like the PS5’s cousin who’s head was severely damaged by a rock. I think that’s sad, hilarious and accurate; the APU was cut down and resold supposedly because when AMD was creating them, they screwed up batches and so instead of making a tonne of e-waste, they chopped off the bad bits (either physically removing the cores and compute units or just disabling them).
BIOS update… This wasn’t so straight forward but I got the information I’m about to share from the Discord server.
Firstly, go to that Discord server if you haven’t already and look for a link to this file:
BC250_3.00_CHIPSETMENU.ROM
You’re also going to want to find and download this ZIP:
4U12G BIOS Update(2).zip
Perform these next actions in the order given:
- Extract the Zip
- Copy or move the BC250_3.00_CHIPSETMENU.ROM file into the root of the folder named BIOS EFI.
- Look for a file in BIOS EFI named ROBIN5.00, and delete it or move it somewhere.
- Rename BC250_3.00_CHIPSETMENU.ROM to ROBIN5.00
- Prepare your USB, format it in FAT32
- Move the contents of BIOS EFI into the root of your USB (DO NOT MOVE THE BIOS EFI FOLDER THERE!@!! JUST THE CONTENTS!)
- Safely Eject your USB drive
- Ensure your BC-250 is powered down, that any USB storage devices, NVME etc – all removed
- Plug in the USB drive having the BIOS files in the root of its file structure.
- Turn on the BC-250
Run these commands in the bios' CLI without the quotes:
"blk0:"
press enter!
"Flash.nsh"
press enter!
Now, you should get a screen telling you that things are updating etc etc; wait however long you have to for that update process to complete. Do not interrupt it for fear that your investment has gone down the drain in irreperable misfortune! Though, I’m pretty sure if you brick this thing you can bring it back to life with SPI flashing – i’ve never done that and I don’t really want to start, not yet!
And when your system comes back online from the Bios update, try to enter Bios immediately; you’re going to want to set the GPU/ System ram split to accomodate your usecase for this thing. This part is kind of confusing regarding the setting you’re going to choose, and I ultimately don’t understand the logic behind it, but you need to access the graphics settings in Bios and set the memory limit to 512M.
That’s going to look like this:
Once you set, and save that configuration in BIOS (F10) you’re going to want to make sure you have STEAM installed! and some games to test!
