Defective PS5 chips allegedly find their way into AsRock's cryptomining rig

Twitter user Komachi has discovered a US$14,800 ASRock mining rig allegedly made in partnership with AMD. The mining server in question appears to use 12 AMD BC-250 APUs. What are the AMD BC-250 APUs? Komachi speculates they are defective PS5 SoCs, a thought shared by Tom’s Hardware. If AMD BC-250 is a repurposed PS5 chip, this won’t be the first time, since AMD has already tried to clear its inventory of PS5 APUs with the release of the AMD 4700S desktop kit.

ASRock’s cryptomining server is powerful, delivering a total of 610 MH/s. As a comparison, Nvidia RTX 3090 delivers about 120 MH/s of ETH mining capability. The AMD BC-250 delivers about 50 MH/s, per Tom’s Hardware. So, 12 AMD BC-250s would deliver a combined total of 600 MH/s when mining ETH.

Other specifications of ASRock’s mining computer include 16 GBs of GDDR6 memory, two 1200 W PSUs, and five cooling fans. The PC is currently up for sale in Slovenia at an eye-watering price of €13,499.

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