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jauntywundrkindtoday at 5:32 PM3 repliesview on HN

I'm tempted to go order yet another BC-250, even though I haven't gotten the first one going. Sure the Machine is considerably more modern, has great new features, probably vastly better power efficiency (even though it's only 6nm vs 7nm surprisingly). But 288GB/s memory bandwidth? Versus the BC-250's 448GB/s? https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/steam-machine-gpu.c437... https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/playstation-5-gpu.c348...

Honestly tempted to buy a couple for relatives, who do some phone gaming and one who owns a 3DS they use, and see if they find anything interesting in PC gaming. Also make it a decent media center of course too.


Replies

ThatPlayertoday at 10:17 PM

Last I checked the idle power consumption of the BC-250 was on the higher side to make me not want to use it as a media center, though that could be my PSU. No hardware decode/encode (yet) either.

And lack of DRM makes a PC in general a mediocre experience for official streaming services if you want more than 720p streaming. If you care about that.

lucius_verustoday at 9:11 PM

I got impatient waiting for the Steam Machine to come out and grabbed a BC-250 on ebay that was already set up with a case, fan, and power supply. Works great for reasonably demanding games (CONTROL, Elden Ring, etc.).

Now that I see the final price of the Steam Machine, I'm gonna be recommending the BC-250 more strongly.

tylerflicktoday at 5:46 PM

Are you using the stock cooler? I’m going with an AIO for the APU, but I worry that the little heatsinks I’m planning for the VRMs aren’t going to cut it.