> 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.
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?)
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!
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.
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:
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 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.
> 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.
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!
Yeah, too expensive now for what it is
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.
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
Why not just replace the battery in your Steam Deck?
Seriously, please don't throw away perfectly functioning hardware just to avoid unscrewing a few screws.
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.
This is the finest advertisement for buying a genuine Steam Machine that I have ever seen.
wondering how is idle power after optimization
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
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/
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
How well does HDMI CEC work on this?
Not at all
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.
It has no HDMI port. Some DP > HDMI adapters do CEC.