A YouTuber has resurrected the faulty APU chip of a PS5, which was then resold with a motherboard, and has turned it into a working gaming PC.
Jon Bringus, better known by his YouTube channel’s name Bringus Studios, is a maestro of unusual gaming builds. Having transformed the shell of an OG Xbox dev kit into a full PC, he now sets his sights on more modern hardware – the PlayStation 5.
Most modern game consoles have much in common with PCs. The primary difference is that in most gaming PCs, the graphics card and CPU are separate. In a console, that isn’t the case. Instead, the GPU and CPU are on the same chip, a configuration usually referred to as an APU.
During manufacturing, AMD found that some PS5 APUs had working CPUs, but broken GPUs. In an attempt to make lemons into lemonade, AMD decided to mount these hobbled APUs to a motherboard anyway and sell them.
The result, as Bringus noted in his video, is what looks on the surface like a mini-ITX motherboard with a very odd heatsink assembly. In essence, however, this is a cut-down PS5 with a missing graphics chip.
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There were some hurdles to overcome. Unlike the PS5, this motherboard doesn’t come with any M.2 SSD slots, and can only support the 16 GB of RAM that comes pre-installed on the board. It is not possible to add more RAM modules.
Since the embedded GPU on this motherboard is non-functional, Bringus needed to introduce his own graphics card. He eventually settled on AMD Radeon 6950 XT, which barely fit in the diminutive mini-ITX case he chose for the build.
The end goal of the build was to create a PC for gaming in the living room which was capable of out-performing Bringus’ much-loved Steam Deck. Needless to say, it more than accomplished this goal.
Bringus is just one of many YouTubers who take great delight in repurposing or restoring obsolete or damaged electronics.
