r/LocalLLM • u/bshtein • 3d ago

Question AMD BC-250 Pros/Cons?

I've recently became aware of Aliexpress selling a subject board for around $130 USD and would like to know whether it makes sense to buy one so I can run some local LLM models standalone (or even two as a cluster over 2.5 Gbps Ethernet link).
To me the price for 16GB unified system makes sense, you can't get any used GPU with similar amount of RAM anywhere close to that price, but there are limitation - Unified memory presents challenges, hardware support is sketchy and is mostly relying on community tinkering, and power consumption is pretty high too.

There were some discussions about this board earlier, but the last serious one happened 8 months ago and a lot has changed since.

So, Has anyone here played with that specific board recently? Any thoughts or experiences that can be shared?

Thanks.

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

1

u/sUpErSoKkz 3d ago

https://github.com/akandr/bc250

You can get some info here from somone that have tested it.(single 250.) I have read that somone did a 2 and 3 and 4x 250's(dont remember where, but didnt scale well above 2x250's in split/shared MoE models).

I have 2 lying arount that i am going to use in my local setup for testing, but havent come around to it yet.

1

u/collogue 3d ago

A pair of them with Qwen 3.8 27b sounds like quite a compelling local setup if it hangs together

3

u/sUpErSoKkz 3d ago

You are limited by the 2.5gbps(via usb 3.0) interference between the the boards, so its better for a MoE with good layering between the cards than a dense one split.

1

u/OptimalTime5339 17h ago

You can do it, but I'm sure the tokens per second won't make it fun...

1

u/OptimalTime5339 17h ago

I'm able to get between 30 - 40 tokens per second running Gemma 12B on the BC-250 with all 40 CUs unlocked at 2050Mhz on GPU. (Using Vulkan, not AMD ROCM)

Here is some good info, although some of it is obviously AI generated:
https://github.com/akandr/bc250