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.
