ASRock BC-250 used for Steam Machine duty gains third-party hack to unlock all 40 CUs — mining board now has more CUs than a base PS5 | Tom's Hardware
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(Image credit: YouTube - ETA Prime)
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DIY gaming enthusiasts have repurposed ASRock’s BC-250 mining boards into “Steam Machines” since late 2025, when the boards started appearing on eBay for well under $150. The board comes equipped with a PS5-derived SoC and 16GB of GDDR6 memory, making it a capable platform for playing PC games via Linux distros such as Bazzite. Now, YouTuber ETA Prime reports that someone has figured out how to unlock the SoC’s 40 CUs, giving the mining blade more GPU cores than a base PS5.The 40 CU hack comes via a driver-level register patch from a GitHub post by duggasco (via Old Lamer on YouTube). The patch unlocks all 40CUs through a kernel module parameter that writes to two hardware registers during GPU driver initialization. The hack not only unlocks all the CUs on the SoC but also boosts power consumption to 125W at 1,500 MHz. The GitHub poster recommends that users set the GPU at 1,500 MHz at 900 mV to keep temperatures in check. Overclocking the GPU to 2GHz, a common overclock on these boards, overwhelms the cooling system.
$100 Steam Machine GPU Unlocked! PS5 APU (ASRock BC-250) - YouTube
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Insane AMD BC-250 Unlock: 16 locked CUs Activated. Now more CU than Sony PS5 has! Up to +30% gains! - YouTube
Watch On Unlocking the full 40 CUs gives the BC-250 nearly double the amount of GPU cores to work with. The mining board comes with B-grade PS5 dies, resulting in only 24 CUs unlocked out of the box to avoid enabling potentially defective cores on the SoC. As a result, switching on all 40 CUs on the chip does not magically make any potentially defective cores functional and should be done with caution.Latest Videos From
ETA Prime recorded up to a 28% performance increase with the extra 16 CUs unlocked. In Cyberpunk 2077, the 40 CU configuration achieved 17% greater performance, reaching 42 FPS compared to 36 FPS with the stock configuration. Hitman 3 similarly achieved 19% better performance with the 40 CU configuration, reaching 69 FPS compared to 58 FPS with the stock 24 CU configuration. GTA 5 saw a 24% improvement with the 40 CU configuration, reaching 72 FPS compared to 58 FPS with the console running the stock 24 CU configuration. Finally, Spider-Man 2 achieved 28% greater performance, achieving 46 FPS compared to 36 FPS with the stock 24 CU configuration. All of the aforementioned games were tested at 1080p high settings with the GPU clocked at 2 GHz.The YouTuber’s benchmarks show that the extra CUs provide a significant performance boost for the mining board. The only caveat is that BC-250 owners will need to win the silicon lottery — having 40 perfectly working CUs to make the hack functional. That said, the hack also supports activating 32 or 38 CUs, so owners who didn’t win the silicon lottery aren’t left completely in the dust. The extra performance only makes the BC-250 an even better option for DIYers to build a cheap, yet capable gaming machine during the RAM crisis. For the uninitiated, the BC-250 does not require dedicated RAM featuring 16GB of GDDR6 memory.
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Aaron KlotzContributing WriterAaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.
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