A Steam Machine Clone For An Indeterminate but Possibly Low Cost
For various reasons, crypto mining has fallen to the wayside in recent years. Partially because it was never useful other than as a speculative investment and partially because other speculative investments have been more popular lately, there are all kinds of old mining hardware available at bargain prices. One of those is the Asrock AMD BC250, which is essentially a cut down Playstation 5 but which has almost everything built into it that a gaming PC would need to run Steam, and [ETA PRIME] shows us how to get this system set up.
The first steps are to provide the computer with power, an SSD, and a fan for cooling. Itās meant to be in a server rack so this part at least is pretty straightforward. After getting it powered up there are a few changes to make in the BIOS, mostly related to memory management. [ETA PRIME] is uzing Bazzite as an operating system which helps to get games up and running easily. It plays modern games and even AAA titles at respectable resolutions and framerates almost out-of-the-box, which perhaps shouldnāt be surprising since this APU has a six-core Zen 2 processor with a fairly powerful RDNA2 graphics card, all on one board.
Itās worth noting that this build is a few weeks old now, and the video has gotten popular enough that the BC250 cards that [ETA PRIME] was able to find for $100 are reported to be much more expensive now. Still, though, even at double or triple the price this might still be an attractive price point for a self-contained, fun, small computer that lets you game relatively easily and resembles the Steam Machine in concept. There are plenty of other builds based on old mining hardware as well, so donāt limit yourself to this one popular piece of hardware. This old mining rig, for example, made an excellent media server.
youtube.com/embed/q_CxcbS5HI8?ā¦
hackaday.com/2026/01/02/a-steaā¦