Unlocking 40 CUs on a Dumped ASRock BC-250 Mining Card
My BC-250 Journey (With 40 CUs Unlocked)
The ASRock BC-250, a mining card left as e-waste after Ethereum's shift, now runs Linux natively thanks to community documentation. Matthew bought two from AliExpress for £126 and £103, discovering that AMD's lax binning left many cores fully unlockable. Both cards unlocked 40 CUs, though only the pricier one got all 8 CPU cores. He benchmarks gpt-oss-20b via llama.cpp Vulkan, hitting 100 T/s at 8K context. A quirky side project for Linux enthusiasts.
With a lot of work (from people who know how to write documentation), the ASRock BC-250 now has full native Linux support.
- j-kent
I have one of these and it has been a fantastic project, and a solid steam machine stand in. Great for emulation and even some recent games. Not mentioned in the post but it is a repurposed PS5 APU. the 8 cpu core unlock that just became available seems to get you an additional 10fps.
- RALaBarge
I've yet to really run mine since I dont have a great solution for the heat -- I hear it pulls 60w straight so it would be mega hot I presume.
- aleksejs
Is your heat sink entirely unmodified? Opening up the fins should make it a lot easier to cool.