I bought one while waiting to see if my Steam Machine reservation would be fulfilled.

I paid ~$186 shipped for the board on eBay 5 weeks ago. I use an ATX power supply and NVMe that I had laying around and I printed a big case for it[0].

I seem to have gotten a good one as it has no problems after unlocking the extra CPU/GPU cores.

I run vanilla Arch on mine configured to boot into Steam. The jank factor is pretty high but it does trade blows with the Steam Machine for a fraction of the price.[1]

I did end up going through with the purchase of a 512GB Steam Machine for $1160 w/tax and swapped in a 2TB NVMe. It is definitely a more polished/living room-ready product and I'm happy with the hardware but it's definitely a questionable value.

It's worth reading over the docs[2] first before committing. There are lots of options for cooling, storage, and power supplies. Just depends on what you want to get out of it and how much time you want to invest in it. There are pre-made images so you don't necessarily need to be a Linux expert but it would help if you want to stay on top of the latest developments. There is still on-going work to get even more performance[3]

- [0] https://www.printables.com/model/1789618-bc-250-atx-case-dua...

- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Sw1SdU9buQ

- [2] https://elektricm.github.io/amd-bc250-docs/

- [3] https://github.com/lonewolf0622/BC250-Native-Mesh-Shaders-

▲

serbuvlad 2 hours ago | parent [-]

What's the performance delta? I'm waiting on a SM reservation but I wouldn't mind saving $500+ :)

Is there any "jank" during active use or is this mostly a set up thing?

	▲	jolan an hour ago \| parent [-]
		They are very close in benchmarks. https://i.imgur.com/Bk5Dcfb.jpeg I think we will continue to see some performance improvements for both systems over the next coming months. It works great if you turn the BC-250 on, play games, and turn it off. By jank, I mean it's not a streamlined console experience like the Steam Machine. There's no suspend/resume and the idle power is quite high. If you want wifi/bluetooth, you'll have to pick a chipset well supported by Linux. (I use ethernet and a steam controller). If you want USB ports and a power button in the front like a console would have, you'll have to pick a solution for those. Carefully read over the options for power and cooling. They're very important if you're going for max performance. All the little extras add to the over-all cost as well. https://mosfet.party/ sells a bunch of BC-250 add-ons to give you an idea of price and options.