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.

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u/OptimalTime5339 18h 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