This page is for documentation and information on the ASRock/AMD BC-250, and about running it as a general purpose PC. These are compute units sold in a 4u rackmount chassis for the purpose of crypto mining. Thankfully everyone who bought these for that purpose lost a lot of money and is selling them off for cheap!

• Features an AMD BC250 APU, codenamed 'Ariel', a cut-down variant of the APU in the PS5. It integrates 6x Zen 2 cores, at up to 3.49GHz (ish), as well as a 24CU RDNA2 iGPU (Codename 'cyan-skillfish'). The standard PS5 SoC has 36CUs.
• 1x M.2 2280 slot with support for NVMe (PCIe 2.0 x2) and SATA 3
• 1x DisplayPort, 1x GbE Ethernet, 2x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.0
• 1x SPI header, 1x auto-start jumper, 1x clear CMOS jumper, 5x fans (non-standard connector), 1x TPM header
• NCT6686 SuperIO chip
• 220W TDP, so make sure you have a good quality power supply with PCIe 8-pin connectors available and a plan for cooling it. You can, in a pinch, get away with directly placing two 120mm fans directly on top of the heatsink. If you are doing custom cooling, don't forget the memory!!! Its GDDR6 it runs really hot!!!!

Further connector pinouts and a detailed listing of chip ID can be found on the hardware page.

J1000 is a standard 8-pin 12V PCIe power connector.

J2000 and J2001 are compatible with 8-pin Molex Micro-Fit connectors and are pinned as below:

   v                     v
[ LED1 12V 12V 12V ]  [ 12V 12V 12V GND ]
[ LED2 GND GND GND ]  [ GND GND GND PGD ]

For more detail on the non-power pins, check their section of the hardware page.

Keep in mind the BC-250 has a TDP of 220W.

Power and reset buttons are located on the rear I/O.

CPU_FAN1 is a normal 4-pin PWM-capable fan header. J4003 exposes CPU_FAN1 as F1* and provides four additional PWM fan control signals as follows, though no power is provided from this connector.

[ GND F1T F2T F3T F4T F5T DET     ]
[ GND F1P F2P F3P F4P F5P GND GND ]
   ^

The F*T pins are the tachometer outputs from each respective fan, and the F*P pins are the PWM outputs that can be sued to control their speeds. Note that the F1* pins are electically connected to CPU_FAN1.

• 16GB GDDR6 shared between the GPU and CPU. By default, this will be set to either 8GB/8GB (CPU/GPU) or 4GB/12GB, depending on your firmware revision, and requires flashing modified firmware to change.
• I've seen people mention using Smokeless_UMAF to try and expose these settings; Don't try it, you may cause permanent damage.
• If you are using these boards for gaming, make sure that you set the VRAM allocation to 512MB for the best experience (After flashing firmware).

• Linux:
  • At this point, Linux support is almost perfect. Pretty much any distro shipping a modern kernel + mesa should work fine.
  • Don't run LTS distros on this hardware.
• Windows:
  • No
  • It will boot, but the GPU is not supported by any drivers and is unlikely to ever be. Everything else seems to work alright, so I guess if you've been kicked in the head recently you could use it for non-GPU focused workloads.
• MacOS:
  • Next person to ask this will be asked to find out if the PCIe bracket counts as a flared base.

It should all just work with any recent release from Fedora/Bazzite etc. However, HW encode/decode will not work because we are missing the required firmware for the VCN. This probably won't change any time soon, as Sony are the ones blocking this.

• Upstream support landed in Mesa 25.1. This should be shipped by most big distros at this point
• You may also need to set ttm.pages_limit=3959290 and ttm.page_pool_size=3959290 as kernel options to access more than 8GB of the shared memory. Thanks Magnap :)

• A modified firmware image is available at this repo (Credit and massive thanks to Segfault). He is responsible for most of the information on running these boards. Say thank you.
• Flashing via a hardware programmer is recommended. Get yourself a CH347, or a Raspberry Pi Pico, or anything else capable of recovering from a bad BIOS flash.
• DO NOT FLASH ANYTHING WITHOUT HAVING A KNOWN GOOD BACKUP
  • SPI flash header pinout:

      [ GND SCLK MOSI    ]
      [ VCC  CS  MISO  ? ]
         ^
    

• VRAM allocation is configured within: Chipset -> GFX Configuration -> GFX Configuration. Set Integrated Graphics Controller to forced, and UMA Mode to UMA_SPECIFIED, and set the VRAM limit to your desired size. 512MB is best for general APU use. You will have a worse experience overall with a 4/12 split, outside of specific circumstances. Credit to Segfault
• Many of the newly exposed settings are untested, and could either do nothing, or completely obliterate you and everyone else within a 100km radius. Or maybe they work fine. Be careful, though.
• Note: If your board shipped with P4.00G (or any other BIOS revision that modified the memory split) you may need to fully clear the firmware settings as it can apparently get a little stuck. Removing the coin cell and using the CLR_CMOS header should suffice.

• In order for lm-sensors to recognize the chip (ID 0xd441), you must load the nct6683 driver. You can so via modprobe nct6683 force=true or by adding options nct6683 force=true to /etc/modprobe.d/sensors.conf, and nct6683to /etc/modules-load.d/99-sensors.conf and regenerate your initramfs.
• Once enabled you should see a bunch more sensor data reported, including important temps :)
• Massive thanks to yeyus for this info.

• A GPU governor is available here. You should use it. Values are set in /etc/oberon-config.yaml.
• This is also available as a Fedora COPR package here.
  • You can also use the following commands to set the clocks manually:

    echo vc 0 <CLOCK> <VOLTAGE> > /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:08.1/0000:01:00.0/pp_od_clk_voltage
    echo c > /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:08.1/0000:01:00.0/pp_od_clk_voltage
    

• These boards more or less just work now, and all you need to do is install a distro, install the GPU governor, and then go to town.
• Please don't make issues asking for help with anything but these boards.
• A discord server exists here. This is a community of people running and pushing the limits of these boards. Feel free to say hi.

• Segfault
• neggles
• yeyus