The ASRock BC-250 is interesting. Sold as a mining card during the crypto boom of 2021/2022, then killed by Ethereum’s proof-of-work migration, leaving many mining farms out of business with many BC 250s never used or even opened. Dumped as e-waste.
With a lot of work (from people who know how to write documentation), the ASRock BC-250 now has full native Linux support. Even better, as AMD got lazy in their binning process, but not fusing off “faulty” cores. Many have been found to be fully unlockable.
So-far I’ve purchased two BC-250s off AliExpress. One for £126 and one for £103 (back-to-school sale and PayPal pay later discount because getting discounts for interest-free credit…). The £103 one, not including the pending £29.38 that apparently is meant to arrive in a few months, making it effectively £74.06.
Both of them unlocked 40 CUs; however, only the £126 one unlocked all 8 cores. The cheaper one having a faulty CPU core (only one being “Golden” is a reeee moment but not awful for a GPU-focused server).
Did benchmark with gpt-oss-20b (with llama.cpp using Vulkan). Up to 8K context at 100T/s while 16K context was 77T/s. GDDR6 bandwidth for you.
For the power supply, I went for the CORSAIR CX550 which while not the best PSU is perfectly fine for the BC 250 and was only £30 (including a UK plug purchased separately) on Amazon resale (Used Very Good aka new but damaged box as people avoided it after Labs poor results for it).
Yes, you see some tape from me optimising air flow as it’s a really hard to cool card (also why I added a few mini stick-on heat sinks on top to provide extra thermal mass to give the heat sink enough time to spread heat but I’m no engineer). It’s a power-hungry beast.
With the Linus Tech Tips video coming soon and Switch and Click video already out, the “based” BC-250 era will soon be over. Switch and Click GPU only unlocking an extra 4 CU (28 total) being the worst I’ve seen yet online. Though I think she got hers off eBay while most people get them off AliExpress (SZ HONGXUNJIE ELECTRONIC is the seller I got mines from).
A nice side project. Recommended for any Linux nerd, even non-gamers.
Published: 29th August 2026