PS5 Chips That Didn't Make The Cut Are Being Used To Build Crypto Mining Rigs

The PS5 features what could be the most powerful APU (CPU and GPU combo) ever put in a gaming console to date. To be classified as such, the chip has to meet certain strict standards set by Sony. But those who don't make the cut get sent to the crypto mines, apparently.

This was the fate of several repurposed PlayStation 5 chips, 12 of which were spotted in a crypto mining rig from ASRock. According to NotebookCheck.net, the aforementioned cryptocurrency mining rig costs a cool $14,800 US and is powerful enough to deliver 610 MH/s.

In comparison, you'll have to build a crypto mining rig with at least five NVIDIA RTX 3090s to be in the same ballpark as ASRock's rig in terms of mining performance. But this isn't really a weird piece of news, considering how Sony and ASRock do their business.

For now, the aforementioned rig featuring the defective PS5 APUs is being sold on Bolha.com, which looks to be a Slovenian buy-and-sell site. Oddly enough, the rig is nowhere to be seen on ASRock's official website.

The PS5 APUs found in the mining rig is officially called AMD BC-250 mining APUs, which Tom's Hardware confirms are indeed quite popular among miners, specifically in Europe. They cite a Norwegian site, for instance, who says that one BC-250 chip is able to pump out 50 MH/s and churn out a profit of around $3 a day.

Not Out Of Character For ASRock Or Even Sony

By now, you should know that ASRock is a well-known brand in the crypto mining community. A quick look at the company's website will give you several mining-specific motherboards, PCIe risers for building GPU-powered mining rigs, and others.

As for Sony, this is also not the first time that they've resold defective PS5 chips. In the past, AMD has released a barebones PC kit containing a Zen 2-based 4700S chip. This chip is, of course, another repurposed PlayStation 5 APU that didn't make it during Sony's rigorous QC process.

What Does This Mean Moving Forward?

With this news, does this mean that you can just somehow plop several PS5s together, put in a homebrew mining software, and start mining crypto on them?

If you have a certain amount of technical know-how, then perhaps it is possible. According to DualShockers, some folks in China have reportedly figured out how to hack Sony's next-gen console to mine cryptocurrency at around 99 MH/s, though there was no way of confirming that it actually happened.

As of late, the PlayStation 5 has still not been jailbroken. And that's the only thing keeping it from people who want to run homebrew software on it, like one specifically designed to mine cryptocurrency. But maybe that's only a matter of time, as hackers have already reported they're "close" to cracking the security of the console.

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Written by RJ Pierce