GoKawiilHobbyist unlocks all 40 compute units on discounted ASRock BC-250 mining cards
A hobbyist bought two ASRock BC-250 mining cards from AliExpress for £126 and £103 respectively, and successfully unlocked all 40 compute units on both despite AMD's binning meant to disable some cores. One card also unlocked all 8 CPU cores, while the other had one faulty core, but both performed well running the gpt-oss-20b language model via llama.cpp, hitting up to 100 tokens per second at 8K context.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The BC-250, originally built for crypto mining and rendered obsolete after Ethereum's shift away from proof-of-work, is finding new life as an affordable AI inference and computing platform thanks to community-driven Linux support and undocumented unlock potential. This case highlights how e-waste from the mining bust can be repurposed cheaply for local AI workloads, though growing public attention from tech YouTubers may drive up prices and reduce availability of easily unlockable units.
- Two ASRock BC-250 mining cards were bought secondhand for roughly £74-£126 each and had all 40 compute units unlocked.
- The cards achieved solid AI inference speeds, running a 20B-parameter language model at up to 100 tokens per second.
- Rising YouTube coverage of the BC-250's hidden potential suggests its bargain pricing and easy unlocking may soon disappear.
Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM 120mm Fan — Repurposed mining hardware like the BC-250 runs hot and loud out of the box, so a quiet high-static-pressure fan is the natural first upgrade for a homelab tinkerer. The NF-A12x25 is Noctua's flagship 120mm PWM fan, ideal for strapping onto a bare board or shoehorning into an open-air rig running local LLM inference around the clock.
See Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM 120mm Fan on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: worldofmatthew.com — Matthew Morgan, 2026-08-30
Published there as: “My BC-250 Journey (With 40 CUs Unlocked)”
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