Turning a $70 Rejected PS5 Board Into a Budget Gaming PC

Hardware tinkerers are turning $70 cryptomining boards built from rejected PlayStation 5 chips into ultra-budget Linux gaming rigs.

The AMD BC-250 started life inside ASRock rack-mount crypto servers. Under the hood, it uses "binned" PS5 chips—silicon that failed Sony's quality checks for console use. Instead of scrapping them, AMD repurposed the hardware, putting six Zen 2 CPU cores, 24 RDNA 2 compute units, and 16 GB of shared GDDR6 memory onto a standalone board. Now that crypto mining has cooled off, second-hand units are circulating on eBay for around $70 to $100.

Why it matters: With community tweaks and driver updates, these surplus boards can run modern games like Cyberpunk 2077, Hitman 3, and Counter-Strike 2 at playable framerates. It gives budget builders hardware performance close to an entry-level GPU for a fraction of the cost.

Know this: It isn't an out-of-the-box experience. You have to flash a custom BIOS using a bootable image, tweak memory allocations, run a Linux distro like Manjaro (Windows lacks proper graphics drivers), and physically modify the server heatsink to mount a standard cooling fan. Developer Csaba Kecskemeti published a full how-to guide and 3D-printable case designs on GitHub.

One company's forgotten mining equipment is a hardware nerd's dream budget build.