Back in 2021, AMD's crypto-mining-focused BC-250 graphics card, powered by the Sony PlayStation 5’s APU instead of regular GPU chips, started popping up on eBay for around $500. Fast forward to the present day, and similar units are now available in China for as low as £96, or about $120. One such unit was ordered and procured by the creator of the YouTube channel Budget-Builds Official, notably sold as the “PS5 graphics card.”
The unit received by the YouTuber indeed looked like a GPU; however, in reality, it was a server-style motherboard with a large passive heatsink, power and fan headers, I/O ports including DisplayPort, USB 2.0/3.0 ports, Ethernet, as well as a CMOS battery slot. The unit also included a standard 8-pin PCIe connector to feed power and an I/O shield. According to the YouTuber, at its core, the custom board included the BC-250, a cut-down version of the APU used on the PS5, with six Zen 2 cores (compared to eight on the console), 12 threads, 24 compute units (compared to 36 on the console), and 16GB of GDDR6 memory. Interestingly, the board did not include any provision for standard DDR memory; instead, the GDDR6 memory was divided equally between the system and the Radeon GPU.
