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.
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.
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 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.
Very good article. I have suggestion for the next one - affordable computer for running the latest open-source AI models. That will be a huge hit!
Recent development has 2 / 8 of the CPU cores able to be unlocked too. Originally shipped with 6 CPU cores enabled.
From the article:
> MESSA_SHADER_CACHE_MAX_SIZE
MESSA indeed.
At least we can be reasonably confident an LLM didn't write the article.
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.
It has no HDMI port. Some DP > HDMI adapters do CEC.
Not at all