Where do broken PS5 APUs go to die? In the mines it seems, as ASRock has been discovered to be selling faulty PS5 APUs inside cryptocurrency mining machines. The Asrock mining rigs reportedly feature twelve AMD BC-250 mining cards, all fitted with AMD Ryzen 4700S chips, otherwise known as PS5 APUs that didn't make the cut to play games.
All chip manufacturers have to deal with broken, or lacklustre silicon. That's why some CPUs end up as lower-tier models with the additional faulty cores disabled, or in Intel's case you get F-series chips with disabled graphics that would otherwise just have to be scrapped. In this case, it looks like AMD is repurposing APUs that were initially planned for inclusion in PS5s, as both desktop 4700S CPUs, and as cryptocurrency miners. According to leakers, via Bolha, the chips in this ASRock mining rig deliver around 610 MH/s in total, working out to around MH/s per APU. Each card within the system would therefore make around $2 a day on average, or around $25 a day for the whole system.
With the price of the system said to be around $13,500, that would give this mining rig around 500 day lead in on turning a profit, so it's not exactly swift, even if your electricity is cheap. Once that number's reached, though, a couple of years of profitability might be worth it, especially if you can afford to run a few of these at once.
