Ever wondered what happens to broken or discarded PS5? The faulty consoles are being dismantled by AMD itself to become “official” cryptocurrency mining machines manufactured by ASRock. These machines, in turn, are equipped with chips created from the APU of the Sony video game — a component that combines processor and video card.
The Japanese leaker known as Komachi has discovered that ASRock is selling “tested and certified” cryptocurrency mining servers in Slovenia for $15,000 (about $70,000 in direct conversion). Within these machines are 12 BC-250 chips, manufactured by AMD, operating at 610 MH/s hash rate — or hash rate in English.
These BC-250 code APUs, in turn, are built from the system-on-a-chip (SoC) codenamed Ariel/Oberon of the PS5, according to Komachi. It’s worth mentioning that sony’s video game chip is also manufactured by AMD and includes zen 2 architecture processor as well as RDNA 2 video card —the same technology used in the brand’s desktop GPUs.
The server sold by ASRock even has 16 GB of GDDR6 RAM, as well as the PS5. On the product page, however, the company does not detail the model of the processor used in the machines. This means that one of the chips built from the PS5’s SoC is being used to process tasks that have nothing to do with cryptocurrency mining.
ASRock mining servers sell in Europe for up to $15,000 (Image: Play/PC Gamer)
ASRock machines are heavily sought after by cryptoasset miners because their performance is not limited by features such as the Lite Hash Rate (LHR), present on Nvidia’s RTX 30 series video cards. Some users have even been infected by malware after trying to remove the LHR from the GPUs on their own.
AMD has reused PS5 chips before
It is worth mentioning that this is not the first time that AMD reuses broken or discarded PS5 chips. In 2021, the manufacturer released the AMD 4700S and 4800S —motherboard desktop kits equipped with a SoC identical to that used on the Sony console.
As a console with a lot of graphics processing power, it is expected that the PS5 video card can be used to mine cryptocurrencies. It is only curious to find video game components being sold within servers in countries as isolated in Europe as Slovenia.
