E-Waste to Gamer Rig: The BC250 Budget Steam Machine

An enthusiast repurposes a discarded ASRock BC250 board—an RDNA2-based, crypto-mining unit resembling a neutered PS5—into a budget, Steam Machine–style PC by flashing a new BIOS, reworking cooling, and running Linux; with community tweaks to unlock up to 40 compute units, it achieves roughly GTX 1060 Ti–level performance at 1080p, illustrating open-hardware ingenuity despite setup complexity and higher power use compared with Valve’s Steam Machine.